When I awoke from my slumber, I found that my guide had not slept. Sleep to the natives is a voluntary pleasure, like eating chocolates. I got up off the soft pillowy mattress made of stalks of grass and stretched and blew off the cobwebs. We walked back toward the sagacious throng eager to find out just what this That was that my Thou was akin to. I slept longer than I thought; the sun began to dip toward the West. My shadow was longer than yesterday. A pride of lions strolled past us as Huxley took up one of the cubs to play with it. I felt uneasy around such unorthodox frolicking. Huxley told me tomorrow we could go for a swim in the lake. “Things are different here”, he told me. “You don’t have to hold your breath underwater.” A chalky crescent moon was just beginning to push through the purplish blue sky because of the waning sun. Little specks of luster speckled the country’s enchanted canopy.
As we were walking, Huxley began to brace me for the evening’s lesson. Huxley: “Now listen carefully. What you’ll find this Being to be, this Ground, is something that the unaided intellect can’t fully wrap its arms around. The trunk of this tree is too massive. The branches are too high up to climb. To experience this Being, you need to undergo a mystical death. ‘He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.’ The seed must be put into the ground. The Self must die; for if it doesn’t, there is no room for God. This is hinted at in the annual crop cycle and the dying and rising gods of pagan mythology. To know yourself, you have to die to yourself. To find yourself, you have to lose yourself.”
“Well see recurring themes.”, Huxley added. “The trinity of persons of Christendom is echoed in Hinduism, as if other religions had the same sheet music but played the song in the wrong key. Consider Hinduism. Brahman is the supreme deity, and just as Christ is the wisdom of God, Isvara is the activity of Brahman. Just as Christianity has its angels, Hinduism has its minor deities. God is to be distinguished from Godhead. The trinity manifests the Godhead in the form of persons. The persons are the things that our concepts apply to. The Godhead is that which our concepts cannot apply. And just as in Christianity, the wisdom of God (the Logos) is incarnated in Christ, so other religions have their incarnations. The general theme of ‘incarnation’ is seen in this: that just as Christ is begotten of the Father, so we all are passive relative to God; He is masculine, we feminine. He is the musician; we are the piano.”
Huxley: “We see it again in Buddhism. We have ‘3 bodies’: Dharmakaya (primordial, the Clear Light of the Void), Sambhogakaya (the personal God, as seen in the Old Testament), and Nirmanakaya (the material body, the vessel of the incarnation, the Buddha). In Islam, there are 3: Al Haqq (abyss of the Godhead), Allah (the personal God), and the Prophet (incarnation of the Logos)."
“The Lord’s prayer sums up the mystery of the Godhead: Our Father who art in Heaven. He is ‘ours’, since He is immanent. ‘Art’ means He is Being, the Absolute, the Ground. Finally, He is ‘in Heaven, wholly other, transcendent. Thus, we must die to Self, sacrifice our kingdom to His, ‘They Kingdom come’, but only if it is ‘as it is in Heaven.”
I asked what this meant from our end. What happens when we only worship one aspect of the Divine: say, His power. Huxley: “This doesn’t happen in all cases. But this probably will get us a religion rites, sacrifices, and legalism, following rules. This improves conduct, but that’s about it. It does nothing to enrich character or modify consciousness. I could play a concerto note for note and not be moved by the music. On the other hand, I could be moved by a piece of music and not be able to play a lick. Our calling, our destiny, is to both play and be enraptured!”
I thought about this. God is loving. He is love. I really thought about this. Love. My conduct has changed; my character is changed; my very consciousness is changed. What is the complete change of consciousness we long for?: deliverance! enlightenment! salvation!
As we got closer to the throng, I could finally begin to hear the talking of the sages more distinctly. Most of them were sitting. But one looked at me, and after some murmuring, the one man standing up told us to come and join them. Sitting in a circle were St. Bernard, Shankara, Lao Tzu, St. John of the Cross, and Mr. Eckhart from yesterday. They were all talking about God, or the Absolute. I heard St. Bernard first: “Who is God? I can think of no better answer than, He who is. If you call God good, or great, or blessed, or wise, it is included in these words, namely, He is.”
Shankara spoke to make a point about language: “Words illustrate the meaning of an object. For example, ‘cow’ and ‘horse’ (the words) belong to the category of substance. Now there is no class of substance to which the Brahman belongs. It can’t therefore be denoted by words. Therefore, it can’t be defined by word or idea. It is the One ‘before whom words recoil’.”
Lao Tzu had been silently assenting the entire time: “Exactly. Heaven and Earth sprang from the Nameless.” Sitting beside him was St. John of the Cross who said: “One of the greatest favors 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. The saints in the higher heaven know this. They know him most perfectly who admit He is infinitely incomprehensible.”
Huxley pulled me up and we decided to walk around a bit. Huxley: “It is hard to think of an incomprehensible God. But think of something incomprehensible in our own experience.” At this moment - and inexplicably - Bach’s Suite for a Solo Cello No. 1 in G Major began to dance in the background, as if summoned by a spell, like the cobra to the flute. “The mind can actually affect matter! Extraordinary to think about. Magical! The relation between our minds and bodies is indeed magical. It is like the relation between God and the world. Our minds can affect our bodies in all sorts of ways. I can mentally tame my rabid emotions; I can will my hand to raise; if you will forgive me: there is ESP, telepathy, mind-reading, even entelechy. The evidence I’ve investigated is overwhelming.”
“So, if all this mystery enshrouds the mind, what can we say about God? That He created! Creation. Once created, it is sustained, just as when we sleep, our heart continues to beat, and our lungs continue to inhale and exhale, and the digestive system continues to operate. Our bodies ‘sustain’ us while we sleep just as God ‘sustains’ every electron in the cosmos. In China, this would be called the Tao, the way, the path. St. Paul says: ‘In Him we move and live and have our being.’”
“There is a hierarchy of being in God: the Godhead, the persons, and the incarnation.” As Ruysbroeck says: “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.”
This is the Godhead, the Trinity, prior to the Persons, higher up than the Persons in the hierarchy of being. We say God is one being and three persons. Yet in the order of being, it is ‘out of’ this being that arise the persons: the being begets the persons.
Huxley: “Listen to Dionysius the Areopagite.”
Dionysius: “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 splendors of transcendent beauty. We long exceedingly to dwell in this translucent darkness and, though 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.”
It was starting to make sense. God is nothing, for God is no ‘thing’. God is not a ‘what’; He is a ‘that’. And ‘thats’ aren’t understood through concepts, but direct apprehension. Romeo didn’t love concepts about Juliet; but directly apprehended her. This is why we know God by not knowing Him. Knowing is bound up with concepts. When we directly apprehend, we cease to know, for knowing is bound up with - again - with concepts. The first step toward direct apprehension is annihilating the ego, dying to Self, the wall between our Thou and the That we’re all after.
The sun had set. Most of the sages were fast asleep. I cozied myself against a sycamore tree, remembering that this was the tree Zacchaeus climbed to see Jesus. Huxley meanwhile headed over to a cedar across a swarm of sapphire lilies. I thought I’d like to wake up early the next morning. I rested my head down on a cool clump of grass growing near the stump and drifted swiftly into dream-filled doze.
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Matthew, this is majestic!
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