The Universality of Unknowing
Luther Askeland and the Wordless Way
by Rhoda R. Gilman
Editor's Introduction
As author of the current pamphlet I mainly want to
thank those who have helped me in producing it. From John
Cowan of the Twin Cities Friends Meeting I received support
and encourgement in writing it. John met Luther Askeland
during the closing days of Luther's life and, like me, was deeply
impressed with his thought and his spirit.
I have received helpful suggestions and editorial
review from the Reverend Clement W. Welsh of Annapolis,
Maryland, and from Patricia Williams, editor of Universalist
Friends. Finally, Kari Askeland shared some details of her father's life and
gave permission to reproduce passages from his unpublished work.
To all of them I give my heartfelt thanks.
Rhoda R. Gilman
The Universality of Unknowing
Luther Askeland and the Wordless Way
LUTHER ASKELAND died in February, 2006. I had
not heard from him for several years, so it was a surprise when
he called during the week after Christmas. His voice on the
phone was husky and not much above a whisper, although I
could still recognize the slight Norwegian-American accent.
The cancer, he said, had affected his larynx. In fact, it had taken
a turn for the worse, and he was now staying with his daughter
in Minneapolis to be closer to help and care. Could I get there
for a visit? He would like to see me.
I had first met Luther back in the mid-1980s. We
were both loosely connected then with the North Country
Anvil, an alternative magazine that preached peace, radicalism, and
the environmental gospel from a small town in southern
Minnesota. To me he had been little more than a name and a
thin, bespectacled face lost in the crowd of aging hippies
and threadbare back-to-the-land advocates who gathered once
a year to reaffirm their fading hope for a better world and
their support for the Anvil. {1}
It was in the early 90s that someone from my
Quaker meeting who knew I had practiced Buddhist meditation
for years, gave me a photocopy of an article that had appeared
in the small theological journal Cross
Currents. It was called The God in the Moment, and as Quakers say, it spoke to
my condition. Or, to put the case in less Quakerly terms, it
blew me away!
I am a historian, not by academic training, but by
nature and by a lifetime of working in the field. The mystery of
time has haunted me since childhood. I can recall at age
twelve standing on the site of a tragic massacre that had occurred
a hundred years earlier on a quiet, sunny morning much like the
one around me. History hung in the air like a living
presence. Where had the past gone, I wondered. The cries, the
terror, the sudden anguish of those people were, if anything,
more real than I yet vanished. How? Where?
In the many years since then, the present moment
had become an important focus for me through hours of
meditation, as I strove repeatedly to clear my mind of words, pictures,
and discursive thought. Yet what was left appeared only to be
what I once described as "the crack between the
was and will." Sometimes I pictured myself with my nose pressed against
that crack, hoping to get a slight whiff of the eternity beyond.
Looking at the article, my attention fixed first on
the deliberate, crystalline way in which the writer
distinguished between merely thinking about the present and the effort
it takes "to bring awareness to rest in the transparent presence
of the moment itself." As I read further, he dismissed the
ever-changing mental content of each moment to expose
the featureless remainder as identical with every other moment
in time, whether in ages past or ages future. "The present
moment I can dwell in right now, and someone else's present
moment five thousand years ago, are moments veiled and filled
by different events and experiences, but in themselves
those moments cannot be distinguished each is just a pure
presence, a mysterious `now.'" Pondering the words, I felt the
crack widening, and a new depth of reality opened to me. In a
shadowy way, that reality was intensely familiar, yet I could not say
when or if I had experienced it before.
"We can simply go on and say that there is one
single moment, a moment that abides and is eternal, a moment
outside time, through which, however, the motley, swiftly
changing flow of individuals and events streams." The essay went on
to explore the implications of this fact for one's sense of self
and the world. It described how we struggle to give shape
and boundaries and definition to it all, and how we map it with
language, screening from ourselves the fact that we
actually know nothing of what we are or where.
I had not noticed the identity of the author, but when
I looked back to find what sort of person had produced
these insights, I saw Luther's name, and I felt an unbelieving shock
of recognition. By then the Anvil was no longer in existence,
but I knew Luther had lived near the town of Red Wing, and
an old acquaintance there gave me his phone number. I
called, and he invited me to visit him at his woodworking shop in
the Cannon Valley. It was only some forty miles from my home
in St. Paul.
AS I TURNED OFF the country road that led away
from the Cannon River, a narrow driveway took me to a clearing
in the woods at the foot of a hill. From the steps of what
looked to be a much-remodeled mobile home, an old gray cat,
whose name I learned was Gunnar, greeted me warily. Luther
reassured him and invited me in.
Over a lunch of herbal tea and veggie sandwiches, I
heard that my host was the son of a Lutheran minister. He had
grown up in rural South Dakota and after attending various
church schools, he had earned a degree in philosophy from
Harvard. Then he had taught Scandinavian studies at the University
of Minnesota. At some point in the 1970s he had turned his
back on the academic world and opted to make his living with
his hands. Later we toured the shop he had built from used
lumber, where he did some cabinet-making and furniture work.
His principal income, it turned out, was from a line
of lovingly constructed replicas of the 19th-century
stereoscopes that provided entertainment in Victorian parlors along
with the spread of photography during the 1850s and 1860s.
Invented in 1849, the stereoscope is a simple mechanical
device that allows two pictures taken from a slightly different angle to
be seen separately by each eye. Thus it produces the illusion
of three-dimensional depth, demonstrating how perception
is shaped by the angle of vision and the habits of the neural
system. Luther sold them to collectors throughout the country.
After that visit, our meetings were mainly in
Minneapolis. When Luther came to the city on business, which
usually included visiting the university's library, he would give me
a call, and we would meet at a small Vietnamese restaurant
near the west bank campus. Our conversations were
wide-ranging: philosophy, religion, books, history, current events. We
seldom ventured onto the ground of spiritual experiences, but
there was always the unspoken understanding that they were
present in both our lives.
I was also reading more of Luther's work. Another of
his essays, entitled "Nobody Knows My Name," provides a
striking image that has become a part of my own mental furniture.
That image is from an old Jewish tale of creating an artificial
human or "golem." Luther suggests somewhat playfully that each
one of us is doing this from the time of our birth. "We are all
laboring to turn that dispersed and amorphous question that we
are into a human being, to create something living, formed,
and real that will correspond with our name, something that can
be the proud referent of that spellbinding sound `I'." Our
relentless hunger for a clearly defined, solid reality, both for
ourselves and our world (Buddhists might call it "permanence"),
drives us to the lifelong task of shaping "a completed human
being dancing its millennium."
Luther had published a number of articles, and he
was working on putting them together in a book, united
by introductory and closing essays. Knowing my background
as an editor, he asked me to critique the final one,
entitled "Avignon." It is a reflection on manifestations of what
the Spanish saint, John of the Cross, called "the dark night of
the soul," and it considers three examples. From the sufferings
and ultimate spiritual victory of Juan de la Cruz, Luther leaps ahead
to the desolation of soul endured by the
19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in his years of
poverty, obscurity, and approaching insanity. The essay concludes
with the fall from grace of the medieval German mystic
Meister Eckhart, who near the close of an honored life was
condemned by the Church as a heretic and purveyor of evil. Nothing
is known of Eckhart's final days at the Papal headquarters
then located in Avignon, so Luther is free to speculate. In doing
so, he ends on a somewhat wistful note of hope.
Beyond seeing in it a statement of Buddhism's first
Noble Truth that life is suffering I still struggle with the
essay's full meaning. "Avignon" is without doubt a personal cry
of anguish and a grasping for hope, but it has an urgency
which goes beyond that. In Luther's own valley of despair I
see ominous shadows of the dark night that looms over all
humanity. Sages have dealt before with personal tragedy and even
with social disaster. Just a few years after Eckhart, the Black
Death swept across the world and decimated most of Europe. But
ours is the first generation poised to destroy itself along with
the ancient patterns of species and perhaps even life on earth.
I encountered Luther's thinking as separate articles
until 1997, when he gave me a copy of his finished collection,
Ways in Mystery.{2} There they are introduced with a
step-by-step consideration of the Via
Negativa, or "Way of Unknowing," which takes up more than a third of the book. It is
an uncompromisingly clear statement of the nature and
limitations of mysticism.
The ongoing theme is the tension between human
intellect and mystical "knowing." Intellect demands dualism;
when confronted with singularity, it is silenced. All language is
built on distinction between what is one thing or another, and
all thinking proceeds along that path. The ultimate example
is computer language, where a billion microchips,
repeatedly switching between two positions yes and no can
encompass vast stores of information and potentially all
human knowledge. In contrast, mysticism is mute. It does not deal
in distinctions or representations. The mystic remains forever
a novice, glimpsing momentarily the blissful freedom of
emptiness and uncomprehending awareness.
By the time Luther's book appeared, the everyday
world was fast encroaching on his solitude. A construction
company had bought the adjacent farm, just over the hill.
Heavy equipment was parked there, and the roar of trucks
combined with the growl of earthmovers to destroy the quiet of
his secluded hollow. The industrial use defied local zoning
rules and was blatantly illegal, but county authorities looked
the other way.
The scholar and reclusive mystic was only one side
of Luther. His contentious golem fought back, and the
county courthouse crew endured a blistering attack at several
open hearings. Business ties were strong, however, and
the commissioners were unmoved. At last Luther put his
own property up for sale, firing a final shot in the form of an
article on "Why Citizens Are Cynical About Government,"
published in a local libertarian paper.
His new refuge was more remote. Long-standing
family ties drew him to the Root River valley in far
southeastern Minnesota, where he took up residence in a rented
farmhouse not many miles from the Iowa border. I seldom saw him
after that. We corresponded occasionally, and I learned that he
was working on another book. When my own golem danced
its way into a Green Party campaign for state office, Luther let
me know that he had voted for me. That had been his first visit
to the polls, he said, since he had cast a vote for Barry
Commoner for president in 1980. It was only later that I learned of
his cancer and the respite of a year or two that allowed him
an extended trip to Europe. His purpose in going, he told me,
had been to revisit and contemplate at leisure the great
Gothic cathedrals.
The book he had been writing was completed, and
the manuscript made a slow round of theological publishers
and university presses. It received high praise for its
scholarship, but no offers to publish. There was simply no market for
such stuff, he was told. As he drew closer to death, his daughter
Kari created a Web site and Luther placed the book there
in downloadable form, a final gift to the world. {3}
He entitled the work When the Word-Animal
Discovers Signlessness: Reflections on the Possibility of the
Mystical. It considers from a different angle the themes put forward by
Ways in Mystery, and unlike the latter it is addressed to an
academic audience. With heavily labored precision that often
becomes repetitious, he struggles to lay out in sequence the steps
from habitual language-driven acceptance of "the world," to
a questioning, a seeking, and at last (perhaps) a finding of
the hidden reality that we exist and move in, unperceived
because it is edgeless and permeates all.
Luther himself was indeed a word-animal, and among
his other skills was an impressive command of languages.
In addition to those of modern Europe, he was familiar with
old German, and his self-taught knowledge of Sanskrit resulted
in several published translations. The influence of
Eastern philosophy is more evident here than in his first book.
Although his real inspiration came from late medieval Europe,
and especially from Eckhart, he quotes repeatedly from
the Upanishads, the Buddhist Sutras, the second-century
poet Nagarjuna, the Zen masters, and Sankara, who founded
modern Vedanta.
At the depths he was exploring, the universality
of mysticism and its similarity behind the masks of differing
cultures and belief systems were too obvious to waste time
discussing. He adopts the term "Yoga of Coincidentia Oppositorum"
for the rigorous intellectual discipline which he recommends
that the word-animal follow to get beyond intellect. In its effect on
the mind, the method suggests working with a Zen koan.
He recognizes that word signs like YHWH, Allah, Shiva,
Brahman, Vishnu, and Tao all point to
"This, the utterly nonverbal and unthinkable `where we are'." In English, he maintains, the
syllable "God" is the only one that "comes to us already carrying
within itself the scent, taste, and feel of that uncontained,
indivisible, unsayable, unthinkable signless element pure reality."
IN A BROAD SENSE Luther Askeland was only
restating in his own terms what many others have said before.
Mysticism has been a persistent undercurrent through three thousand
years of the growing human ascendancy over nature that we
call civilization. It has taken some strange forms in different
times and places, and it has been regarded with uneasy suspicion
by authorities of all kinds civil, religious, and
intellectual. Historically mystics and doubters have walked hand in
hand, and they have emerged together in cosmopolitan cultures
where diverse traditions have met and mingled. In today's global
world, this is happening again.{4}
We are forever haunted by the fact that all we know
or ever can know of ourselves or the world is mediated
through our own sense organs and the mental figures created by
that undefined essence called consciousness. Those of a frog or
a bee may reveal an entirely different reality. Even the
certainties of science are not certainties at all, whether in the minute
world of whirling atoms and electrons or the vast cosmos of
galaxies and light years. Built from myriad minds linked by
language, they are as much the product of human sense organs
and consciousness as is the daily world around us.
My own experience at this tells me that the sense of
self the golem we all build is a tissue of memory
binding events together into what we call a lifetime. We look with
suppressed horror at senile elders who have lost the memory
of their life or even their name. And we honor the tales of
our ancestors, whether sung by poets of the oral tradition
or recorded in volumes of history. They give our fragile identity
a niche within the flow of time and are powerful elements
in pushing back the encroaching shadows of unknowing vacancy.
But there is a paradox here. Beyond the desolation
of never knowing our origin, destiny, or true nature, there is
also a strange consolation. When we lay down our golem
and become empty of any certainty or clear relationship to
what we perceive, there is nothing left to divide or set us apart,
either from each other or from all that exists. This is more
often recognized in Eastern than in Western philosophy.
"Emptiness" in Buddhism leads directly to "nirvana." According to Lao
Tsu, the Tao is ". . . an empty vessel that may be drawn from
without ever needing to be filled." And the medieval Sufi mystic
Rumi repeatedly celebrates in his poetry "This emptiness,
more beautiful than existence. . . ." Even in 17th-century
Scotland, a spirit- inspired Quaker once rose in a silent meeting for
worship to declare that "In stillness is fullness; in fullness is
nothingness; in nothingness are all things." {5}
Quakerism has rested from its beginnings on
mystical awareness, which it defined as direct personal experience
of the "Christ within" or "Inward Light." The Quaker form
of worship has been mainly silent, and Friends have
generally followed their founder, George Fox, in his distrust of
words and "notions." At first their "openings" were described
in Christian imagery, but in the 20th century, as
cross-cultural contacts increased and the universality of mysticism
became apparent, their vision was framed in broader terms. By the
1930s and 1940s many Friends were reading the works of Kahlil
Gibran in private and following the inspiration of Mohandas
Gandhi in public action.
Quaker thinkers like Rufus Jones have struggled to
draw distinctions between Quaker mysticism and the Way of
Unknowing. The Quaker experience is communal, they say;
it is affirmative, not negative; it points to acceptance of life
and to action within "the world."{6} Yet the differences are
elusive. The Via Negativa is negative only in rejecting
intellectual content. Whether followed in a silent meeting, a
Christian monastery, a Buddhist meditation hall, or a Sufi dance, it
is most often shared communally. While a few mystics in
all traditions have sought solitude, others has been social
activists. The negation of word-based thought and of a separate self
leads directly to dissolving of boundaries and to a sense of
union with other beings. We feel that this is our true nature,
and there is a fresh intimacy with reality and renewed
compassion for all life around us when we return inevitably to the
joys, sorrows and conflicts of the everyday world.
By identifying "the word" as a central barrier to
full awareness, Luther indirectly perhaps intuitively
touched on what may be a key factor in human destiny. Thought as
we know it is rooted in the structure of language. It has
steadily gained in power and reach as language has moved from
the spoken word to the written word, to the printed word, and
to the electronic word.
Spoken words defined what it means to be human; over
a period of eons language allowed our gregarious ancestors
to create relationships, poetry, and dense webs of culture.
Then some three thousand years ago words painted on papyrus
rolls or sheets of parchment for the first time enabled the
single human mind to capture its own thoughts in precise form
for review, analysis, and reshaping. The same written
words communicated those thoughts to other minds across both
space and time and the result bloomed in philosophy
and mathematics.
Five hundred years ago printing multiplied and
distributed words a thousandfold. Countless solitary readers could find
new companionship in distant minds and thoughts. This fostered
in the individual a sense of private self quite apart from the roles
and status assigned by society and daily life. The sanctity
of class and clergy faded. We do not yet know what changes
the electronic word will bring, but at each step, time and space
or our consciousness of both have expanded as more
minds became engaged, not only across cultures but across
generations. Meanwhile our control over nature has increased, our sense
of helplessness before the ultimate mystery of existence
has retreated, and a "theory of everything" has become the
human goal.
Today we stand face to face with the devastating
results of the power created by our collective minds and our
ignorance of how and why to use it. Yet mysticism still strikes at the
heart of the conflicting certainties and fanatical beliefs that
threaten to tear our world apart. Its message is universal. It also
cuts away the ground from scientific materialism and from
reliance on technology as the only hope for human betterment.
The Way of Unknowing offers an encompassing humility that
goes beyond the recitation of religious or moral "truths" that
are common to different traditions. It rejects a world of
dualism where the ignorant armies of good and evil them and us
embrace each other in endless rounds of mayhem and
murder. And it rejects the arrogance of modern technology with
its tinkering and tweaking at the foundations of life while blind
to the edifice it may threaten.
Luther's words may sound remote and frigid
like Nietzsche on a peak in the Alps "six thousand feet
above humanity and time." Yet the "intuition" that he calls on
to counter our instinctive reliance on language and logic
could just as well be described as the perennial yearning for
meaning and faith. In either case it is there, an undeniable part
of conscious existence.
To touch people in their hearts and lives, the
wordless Way must come down from those windswept heights to
the fragrant, wooded lowlands of emotion. Emptiness must
merge with empathy. This came home to me recently when I attended
a large funeral held in a rural Midwestern church. The
entire community, it seemed, was there.
As a hundred voices were raised in the old hymns
of affirmation, of sorrow, and of hope, I melted within. At
some deep level these were the voices of my ancestors,
confronting and lamenting inevitable death and despair. They
echoed generations of love and of loss the passing of those
more dear than life itself, and the passing of a world of human
struggle that gave life its dignity and meaning. They and I were
one. Yet part of me resisted being engulfed again by the web
of human longing. The beauty was there with the sorrow,
but somewhere in the years of meditation I had glimpsed
freedom from that sense of being a solid self standing with others
like me against the tide of time.
I still belong with those other yearning,
passionate humans; indeed, separation from them is no more possible
for myself than separation of a cell from the breathing body
of which it is a part. Yet for me the Rock of Ages has become
the Wave of Change. That Wave is fluid and constant. It
knows no dichotomy of life and death, good and evil. And as
one turns to ride it and releases one's compulsive grip upon
the Rock of existence, the Wave itself becomes colored
and suffused with love.
It may be that to ride the Wave we need new stories
of how we came to be. For most of us the old ones of
omnipotent, transcendent gods no longer serve, and new ones are
appearing. Some tell us of an exploding universe in which
destruction constantly leads to new creation; others depict a
hierarchical system of life transforming its environment and forever
growing more complex.{7} But stories have a way of subtly
mutating into received truths. And knowledge of The Truth
embodied in words leads inevitably, it seems, to conflict.
An older and surer way lies in denying all
humanly constructed truth and facing humbly our inability to know more
than a sense of mystery. That mystery need not be
distant. Once touched or felt in wordless moments, it hovers on
the fringe of consciousness. We feel faint intimations of its
presence at odd times when our fixed attention on the past and
future wavers.
It is there in a sudden bird call, a chord of music, or
the shadow of a cloud passing across the land. The brush of
an artist may capture it in light spilling into a scene from
an unknown source, in a window opening on a hint of
worlds beyond, or in the arrested motion of a bird in flight. We
can recognize the power of mystery in places where our
forebears have left brooding stone sentinels pointing to the sky or
raised soaring arches that define empty space beyond the reach
of words. But it cannot be seized and held. It is present only
in that instant when consciousness fixes existence in space
and time.
If we do not brush it aside, if we court it in hours of
stillness, it can become a sustained presence within. Our feeble
efforts to express it may describe it differently, but
countless generations have known it. It has survived the
relentless enclosing of our lives in the words and works of human
minds, and it haunts us with reminders that all of life is one.
THERE WAS no public funeral or memorial service
for Luther, but on a Sunday afternoon in March family
members and a few close friends gathered in his daughter's home to
mourn and remember. Some mementoes were laid out on a table
copies of his publications, pieces of fine woodwork,
several complex three-dimensional puzzles that he had devised
and marketed, and, of course, a stereoscope of polished oak.
There were also a few snapshots, including one of Gunnar, his
four-footed companion in solitude. We groped for words as we tried
to define for each other and ourselves what this odd but
ordinary man had meant to us.
Family and friends who had known him from
youth recalled schoolboy pranks that were memorable for
startling ingenuity like somehow suspending a bed from the
ceiling of a gymnasium during the night before an important
game. Others mentioned summers among the wooded hills and
valleys of southeastern Minnesota and his unlikely friendship with
Irvin, a semi-hermit who lived by odd jobs and gathering
ginseng there. Two or three had, like me, sought Luther out after
reading his words and had developed an acquaintance that
touched the core of our being. One college administrator had
never met him but had acquired a deep respect and attachment
for him solely through correspondence. At last our
recollections trailed off into baffled silence. Overhanging the group was
a sense that a remarkable soul had moved quietly among us
and now was gone, almost unnoticed by the world.
NOTES
{1} For an anthology and history of the magazine, see
Rhoda R. Gilman, ed., Ringing in the Wilderness: Selections from
the North Country Anvil (Holy Cow! Press, Duluth, MN,1996).
{2} Luther Askeland, Ways in Mystery: Explorations in
Mystical Awareness and Life (White Cloud Press, Ashland, OR, 1997).
{3} www.lutheraskeland.com
{4} The connection appears repeatedly in Jennifer
Michael Hecht, Doubt, A History: The Great Doubters and
Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to
Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson (Harper Collins, San
Francisco, 2003).
{5} Lao Tzu is quoted in Stephen Batchelor,
Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the
Sublime (Riverhead Books,
New York, 2000), p. 12; Coleman Barks et al, Tr.,
The Essential Rumi: New Expanded Edition (Harper Collins,
San Francisco, 2004) p. 105; William C. Braithwaite,
The Second Period of Quakerism (Sessions, York, UK, 2nd ed.,1979),
p. 336.
{6} Rufus M. Jones (1863-1948) was the best-known student
of the mystical tradition among Friends. In his many
books and other writings he often compared it with Eastern
and Medieval forms of mysticism. For an overview, see
Elizabeth Gray Vining, Friend of Life: A Biography of Rufus M.
Jones (Reprint edition, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of
the Religious Society of Friends, 1981) p. 249-262 .
{7} This is eloquently argued in a pamphlet published by
the Quaker Universalist Group in England. See Clive
Sutton, Human Beings Yearning for a Faith (Torquay, Devon, 2006).
Striking new stories offered in recent years have
included Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe
Story (Harper, San Francisco, 1994) and Edward Goldsmith,
The Way: An Ecological World-View (University of Georgia
Press, Athens, revised edition, 1998).
APPENDIX
Selected Passages From
"The Word-Animal Discovers Signlessness"
Perhaps the final paradox, and the hidden spring
which drives philosophy's unending reflection, is the fact that
reality that essence, that This is what enfolds us most
intimately and what we most intimately are, yet nothing we can utter
or imagine addresses or even relates to it. Regarded from
this perspective, philosophy and theology, or what India
simply called a darshana, "a seeing," is simply the first curious,
bemused sniff consciousness takes when it becomes alert enough to
be startled by This. It is the word-animal's attempt to process
that which cannot be processed in any way, is the endeavor to
bring into one's particular sign-world that intimately
ubiquitous presence which exceeds and ultimately dissolves
all worlds.
________________
In the past, as now, human beings inhabited a
human world, divided into smaller private and greater public
realms, and consisting of the various persons, human actions,
and fabricated objects cultural artifacts and tools of the
kind so familiar to us. But unlike its modern counterpart,
traditional consciousness was further stimulated, enriched, and
transformed by its constant intimate involvement with the
non-human natural world, and so it came to see the human world
as integrated within a greater natural world teeming with forms
of life, forms of perception, and rhythms other than ours.
________________
It is fitting that the West's classic formulation . . . of
this very soft, very disturbing whisper which implies that our
instinctive, habitual,
normal practice is to dream the wrong dream and choose the wrong path should be hidden away as
an innocuous aside in a Dutch philosopher's letter of 1674 to
a Mennonite merchant residing in Amsterdam. While
discussing a question in geometry raised by his correspondent,
Spinoza makes brief allusion to the general principle that
"determinatio negatio est," that is, "determination is negation." Applying
the principle . . . to visible forms, Spinoza regards geometrical
figures as created by cutting away "the whole of matter
considered indefinitely." To conceive a figure is to conceive a
determinate, that is, a delimited thing. "This determination, therefore,
does not appertain to the thing according to its being, but, on
the contrary, is its nonbeing." And so, since a figure is
"nothing else than determination, and determination is negation,
figures, as has been said, can be nothing but negation."
________________
Determination that is to say, definition, identity,
form, measure, particularized being as this or that,
particularized knowing of this or that is negation, not only because
it requires the exclusion of all other particularity, but also
and primarily because it is an infinite negation, for it comes
into being only by abolishing the indeterminate, by
excluding by not being the undivided and boundless. Spinoza's
declaration therefore posits the infinite as pre-existent, as "given." For
the philosopher the infinite is conceptually and existentially
prior to its infinite negation and impoverished substitute,
particularity; and we can now see that myth, grafted as it is onto time,
projects this priority as temporal. And so myths of a fall . . . let loom
in their background a perfection, an unbroken plenitude of
being and knowing, which once, at least, was ours.
________________
Suppose that after an hour concentrating all thought
on forming the paragraph just before this one, I stand up. For
just one extraordinary instant or atom of time during that
minute ascent . . . consciousness in me is nothing but awareness
of something nonspatial and unlimited, something no word
has encompassed, no name has named. It is as if in one instant
I had collapsed out into and now everywhere touch that
edgeless, strangely luminous reality or presence which right now and
most vividly is "where I am," is
This. But minutes later as I walk down the gravel road toward Irvin's, the driver of a
delivery vehicle stops to ask for directions to Houston.
Without hesitation or the slightest inner sense of confusion, I
identify "where we are" and explain how to get "there" from
"here." Only as the car disappears down the road do I ask myself if
I was right ten minutes ago or now; and perhaps I further
ask: what is to be said or thought if there is no such thing as
being "oriented" or "disoriented"? What if the very notion of a
"where I am" is merely one more superstitious, magical,
mythical fabrication, like the Cartesian "I," like "America," like "Thor."
Off the road now and walking by the bur oaks on the
path to and past Irvin's long-empty shack, I try to channel
whatever luicidity I can mobilize into the one great question where am
I, what is This? For a moment I seem to brush against my
meager question's infinite answer, seem to be
in nothing but boundless, unbroken, unsayable reality. And during the next moment
I seem to see most clearly: boundless, unbroken, unsayable
reality is always "where I am," is always what I move into when I
move, what I breathe in when I inhale. But then with the very
first response of mine with which I seek to think, feel, or say
this "reality" or to enact it in a gesture, or echo it in an act
I have already missed it and slipped past it, and am being
carried down a particular path which like all particular paths
leads away from This.
________________
In life as we know it there is just one instant the last
in which instinct-habit is no longer required, for now
there remain no future life-instants to will, ensure, or prepare. In
that extreme moment, instinct-habit that is, all the
operations, including the sensory and verbal perceptions, of normal life
has become useless and can therefore give way. Further,
that final instant is the instant of the I's final breakup,
finitude's dissolution. In it all determination, limitation, and
negation, all division, and all perception by means of sensory and
verbal signs also therefore "give way." Now that animal life and
finitude itself are both breaking up, nothing remains which might
oppose or limit that process of infinite dilation and simplification
which is the innermost essence of the turn. And this means: just
in that final moment the way is cleared for intuition to take
full possession, flooding dying, disintegrating consciousness,
which now is "dead to the world," with an infinite and
seamless content.
Reporting that they have reached that final moment
and then miraculously returned, some recount how they
have hovered with awareness wholly transformed over
their own body and over "life." In terms of the foregoing, they
have flown up out of their now inert golem project into an
edgeless, cloudless, peaceful sky. They have experienced the
unthinkable consummation of the dilation-simplification process,
have known what it is to be uncontained and one.
The Tibetans have beautifully thought that in the
dying person's last moment, normal consciousness vanishes and
one sees instead reality's "Clear Light." Unlike "the world's"
light, which discloses multiplicity in constant change, this
supreme Clear Light is the pure oneness of light before it is
fractured into prismatic color. As "the Clear Light of Pure Reality,"
it knows no bounds. The "dazzlement" it produces in
dying consciousness is like "an infinitely vibrant landscape" in
the spring. The Clear Light is also pure "unmodified" or
non-particularized awareness "like void and cloudless sky," is
"naked, spotless intellect . . . without circumference or centre." For
the woman or man who "recognizes" the Clear Light and
becomes one with it, the bonds of illusion and samsara are broken,
and any future birth will be her voluntary birth as an awakened
one a buddha determined to liberate all the world.
________________
The Latin syllables coincidentia
oppositorum call to mind Nicholas of Cusa, who sometimes writes that all
opposites coincide "in" God, at other times that God is above, prior
to, or beyond their coincidence. God is beyond distinctions
such as that between motion and rest, activity and passivity,
time and eternity, oneness and plurality, being and nonbeing;
since that most perfect being is in this way beyond all
distinction and classification, we cannot even begin to form a concept
of Him, and "the more an intellect understands the degree to
which the concept of God is unformable, the greater this intellect
is." But in spite of this renowned European connection, one
can generalize that the particular preoccupations and
perspectives most hospitable to the Latin phrase are more fully
developed in other above all, in India's traditions. Indian
thought's historically most prominent "seeing" or "school" is
known specifically as the Non-dual
(advaita) Vedanta. One striking example of Buddhism's preoccupation with this theme is
the Vimalakirtinirdesha Sutra's climactic ninth chapter on
"The Dharma-Door of Nonduality." By way of showing how one
may enter that door, each of thirty-one bodhisattvas in turn
identifies a particular pair of opposed conceptions for example
matter and voidness, happiness and misery, transcendental
and mundane which one who seeks "nonduality" must
leave behind.
________________
Normal consciousness comes to identify itself
exclusively, and most significantly and fatefully, with the particular
verbal sign `I'; in consequence, almost everything in "the world"
that is, almost everything which "is" presents itself
to consciousness first of all as something which "I" am not.
This critically important element the simultaneous
emergence of an "identification with" and an "alienation from" is
unique to the process of "I" enchantment, yet the general
manner in which this verbal sign enchants normal consciousness
mirrors the way in which all verbal signs enchant. Bewitched by it
as by any other sign, consciousness does not relate to it simply
as a phenomenon in itself, but rather as identifying a
separate entity "I" which together with all other entities and
events constitutes "the world." It is as if I immediately passed
through the sound itself into that perfectly corresponding being
which as if by magic had materialized from it. In this way
"I" come to picture "myself" as "a person," "a man," "alive,"
etc., and so in addition to that primary "otherness" also
as resembling the others, that is, as one identifiable,
particular, clearly delimited being in a world of myriad such beings. I
see myself as amenable, like all things, to processing by means
of verbal signs, as a "someone" who, like all other persons, can
be verbally identified, described, and explained. I now am
one who at any moment can be gloriously or ignominiously
laid bare by that life story which I or you or even "they" can tell.
We have seen that the diphthong "I" is the audible or
the ghostly interior sound I incessantly make, is the
perennial, constantly trafficked hub of my sentences. It is the sound
with which awareness in me delimits and first defines itself, is
the way in which consciousness is present to itself. The
particular "person" which has materialized from it, and which
awareness passes into as it lets itself be enclosed in the sign, is, like
all other persons, someone in "the world." But also and above
all that "person" now much more ambiguous,
intimate, "subjective," and even close to "nothing" is that with which
consciousness identifies itself, is precisely and
absolutely decisively just what "I" am. For the "I" is one pole of the
two original opposites which establish "the world's"
primary perceptual contents and structure, and upon which the
entire verbal world depends; and of the two ultimate opposites
which first divide and map the world within which it finds itself,
the "I" is the one with which consciousness identifies itself
affectively as well as perceptually, while it perceives the other
"the world out there" precisely as what "I" am not.
________________
All the sign-based things and events normal
consciousness perceives jostle against others comparable with them
within the vast, teeming categories of `is' and `is not', of `persons'
and `things', etc., yet language, bringing to bear
sign-perception's universal principle of binary opposition, naturally opposes
`the one' to `the many', `singularity' to `plurality', `the
incomparable' to `the comparable'. In this way the ancient biology of
sensory and verbal perception has engendered a category
`the unique', `the incomparable', `the one of a kind' which
no object of animal perception, nothing, that is, encountered
in any biological world, can possibly fill; consequently, we
have come to use those signs merely as vague terms of
exaggerated praise or even of dismissal. But now that all opposites and
so all worlds have been dissolved, consciousness is at last
exposed to something the signless element which alone
qualifies for that most "unworldly" category: the incomparable
and incommensurable, the absolutely unique, Latin's
sui generis, Sanskrit's advitiya, that is, "that which has no second.". . .
Spinoza and the medievals have already
equated determination with negation and with finitude, and clearly
in the present case, all else that is, "the world"
having vanished, there remains nothing which possibly
could set limits
to, or bound, or impose an edge on the signless,
indeterminate, and consequently infinite, element. Further, since it is
pure singularity to which no "second" thing might even be
compared for it does not share any category with any other thing
it is omnipresent and oceanic, is infinite, in an
unprecedented, peculiarly "incomparable" way.
________________
The absolute infinity of the signless element is the
infinity of edgeless sky. Its space, everywhere, is the space of
openings, of commencement, is the shining and crystalline virginal
space of spacious doorways and vast thresholds. It is infinite
portal without lintel or frame, is a movement or gesture,
before all "time," signaling an unending and infinite disembarkation, is
a great blossoming flower out into whose ever expanding
circle of efflorescence awareness now is carried, and in whose
infinite petals awareness now opens up.
________________
It is not God's sayable name, but God's
intimate, immediately known, and unsayable
reality, that counts. This is so, even if contact with that reality is imperfect and
intermittent. . . . For reality's touch, even if rare, fleeting, and incomplete,
is more powerful in its immediate and its long-term effects
than the recollection or utterance of any word; and indeed its
greatest influence on turned life may well be subconscious rather
than conscious. . . .
That singular event the touch may seem bereft
of all measurable duration. In this most subtle and volatile
of experience-realms, it is as if that instant of uncontained
free flight out of all horizons into an infinite and crystalline
lucidity has been consummated has already begun fading into
"the past" before unwieldy consciousness even begins turning to
focus upon it. In this way turning consciousness may touch
the uncontained and the unbroken for only a moment, so that
its "time" in God is infinitesimal, but as we have seen, just in
that instant of being a single bare nerve fired by the touch of
the signless element, it receives turned life's essential
nourishment. For just one such moment, a time too quick for awareness
to catch, suffices for turning consciousness to be suffused
or charged with or just transmuted into energies which
will remain to inform and shape the future moments of turned life.
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