Home Ground

 

     The recent full moon allows a glimpse of a special world, especially around three AM, offering a space-time which blends nicely with continued reading in Nishitani’s Religion and Nothingness. Nishitani probes the possibilities of oneself, particularly if explored in relationship to the field of śūnyatā where one engages the void, the emptiness where our contemporary culture often brings the risk of a severe loss of meaningfulness. But this space or place also, perhaps, gives us a best chance of leaning into the other world. “Being” here/there may also be “identified with ‘true reality,’” (p. 294) and thus offers companionship to endure/engage the stress of existentialism.

“‘Not being self in being self,’ on the other hand, means that on the field of śūnyatā the selfness of the self has its being in the home-ground of all other things. On the field of śūnyatā, the center is everywhere. Each and every thing in its nonobjective and ‘middle’ selfness is an absolute center. To that extent, it is impossible for the self on field of śūnyatā to be self-centered like the ‘self’ seen as ego or subject…

As a being in unison with emptiness, then, the self is one absolute center, and, to that extent, all things are in the home-ground of the self. And so far as our self is at the home-ground of all things, that is, on the field of śūnyatā, all things are also at the home-ground of the self. Such a circuminsessional interpenetration, as we  said before, can only come about when all things, including ourselves, are in a nonobjective, ‘middle’ mode of being. As we also noted there, through this circuminsessional interpenetration, all things are gathered together, and as such render possible an order of being, a ‘world,’ and consequently enable the existence of things as well. . .

… This assembly is the force that makes the thing in question be, the force of the thing’s own ability to be. In that sense, we also said that when a thing is, the world worlds …  (Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, pp. 158-9)

     Reading Nishitani, for me at least, is challenging; and this post dares not presume much more than to invite a person to read his work for oneself. Nishitani makes clear the necessity for the individual to enter alone: “Just as no one else can see for us or hear for us, so too none of our actions can be performed by proxy. All actions imply, as it were, an absolute immediacy” (p. 166). 

     While this journey into self has an inevitable aloneness, support does come from guides, from long ago and today. Rumi, in particular, resonates with the theme. For example, from his Discourses:

“At this time the world subsists through heedlessness. If there were no heedlessness, this world would cease to be. Desire for God, memory of the other world, ‘inebriation,’ and ecstasy are the architects of the other world. 

If everyone were attuned to that world, we would all abandon this world and go there. God, however, wants us to be here so that there may be two worlds. 

To that end He has stationed two headmen, heedlessness and heedfulness, so that both worlds will flourish.” (Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin, trans. W.M. Thackston, Jr., 1994, p. 114.)

An earlier translation of this passage by A.J. Arberry offers additional entry into the mystical edge:

“Now this world goes on by reason of heedlessness; if it were not for heedlessness, this world world not remain in being. Yearning for God, recollection of the world to come, intoxication, ecstasy—these are the architects of the other world. If all these should supervene, we would to a man depart to the other world and would not remain here. God most High desires that we should be here, so that there may be two worlds. So he has appointed two sheriffs, one heedlessness and the other heedfulness, that both houses may remain inhabited.” (Discourses of Rumi, 1961, p. 120)

     We are also fortunate to have contemporary companions on the way. David Whyte offers “Sweet Darkness” including an opportunity to listen to his marvelous voice as he presents the poem and adds his rich commentary. 

     The work of Jim Palmer also stands out in relation to this theme. For example, he elaborates the “language of existential health.”

Existential health is the set of capacities that allow a person to engage the conditions of existence directly, without distortion, avoidance, or dependency on external authority. It describes the difference between having beliefs, identities, and frameworks, and actually being able to live in a grounded and coherent way. It is often misunderstood as a philosophy or worldview. It is not what you think about life. It is how able you are to meet it. Where existential health is underdeveloped, people rely on external structures to stabilize what they cannot hold internally. Where it is developed, a person can remain oriented even in the absence of clear answers, fixed meaning, or guaranteed outcomes.

Hidden in the Cold

David would’ve been age 40 today…suppose is, in memory at least… gone just before 19, just over 21 years ago. Reading in the middle of the night from Edith Stein’s The Science of the Cross, adds perspective on loss. In her chapter on “Spirit and Faith” (reflecting particularly on the work of St. John of the Cross, both Ascent of Mount Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul):

Therefore faith is a totally dark night for the soul. But it is precisely by these means that it brings her light: a knowledge of perfect certainty that exceeds all other knowledge and science so that one can arrive in perfect contemplation at a correct conception of faith. That is why it is said: Si non credideritis, non intelligentis (“If you do not believe, you will not understand,” Is 7:9). [fn 3: See Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.3.2-4 ]

From what was last said, it has not only been made clear that faith is a dark night, but also that it is a way: the way to the goal toward which the soul strives, to union with God. For it alone gives knowledge of God. And how is one to arrive at union with God without knowing him? However, in order to be led by faith to the goal, the soul must conduct itself in the right manner.  She must enter into the night of faith by her own choice and by her own power. After having renounced all desire for creatures in the night of the senses, in order to reach God, she must now die to her natural faculties, her senses, and to her intellect also. For in order to reach the supernatural transformation, she must leave behind everything natural. Yes, she must divest herself, as well, of all supernatural goods when God grants her any of these. She must let go of everything that falls into the realm of her power of comprehension. ‘And she must remain in the dark like a blind man, leaning upon dark faith and choosing it as light and guide and not supporting herself by anything she understands or enjoys or feels or imagines. For all this is darkness that will lead her into error or delay. Faith, on the other hand, is above all such understanding, enjoyment, feeling, or imagining.’ [fn 4: Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.4.2-4] 

   from pp. 58-59 Stein, The Science of the Cross

 Looking back at written reflections, this item seems good for reflection:

When You Come to the Land

Halfway to his third-grade class, I lurch at the wheel
spotting bare ankles between jeans and sneakers,
and feeling the cold rubber brake as on our soles.
It’s mid-December. Ice crusts the left-over rain.
How can he not know his socks are missing?
We can’t blame sleepiness as he’s jabbering away
about meteor showers, fishing for a word
to catch the ground between exciting and afraid.
Some line’s down between head and foot.
Did a big storm pass through, snow and wind?
Has the ground around him been too harsh?
The stares cold inside the house, an icy silence?
Oh, perhaps he’s in search of winter’s power,
that makes hidden, in the cold, the hope of spring.

 

Revelation: Resonance and Radiance

2AM or maybe three, with coffee in the dark. Notes from recent nights.

   Vibrations of sound and light offer guidance for travelers between the worlds. Solitude and silence mark access with entrances signaled and illuminated by the qualities of God, especially Beauty, Truth, Love. Those moments out-of-time whisper in silences soon past midnight, reverberating with “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you...” (Rumi, of course) 

   Because Faces of the Divine reach beyond into the Unknown, the holy qualities shift with elusive forms, refusing to hold still while paradoxically affirming authenticity. 

   Resonance has become a closer friend over these seventy-eight years: Intimacy felt by absence as well as Presence; the sense of the vital-missing that leads most surely away from superficial enchantments--too material and too temporal. 

   The vibration, maybe that called “felt sense,” opens the boundary between worlds, becomes more hopefully trusting through repeated experiences in the beautiful/true/living that which awes/inspires/cares. It’s an intimate, interactive, almost unknowing, risky yet reassuring. 

   This texture knows loneliness and wishes for company in love, the textured kind that emanates from memoir—like when Mark Taylor writes of needing countryside instead of city, and my deep-knowing sighs. 

“Eventually, things reach the tipping point and more becomes different. Speed renders life ever more transient and thus increasingly ephemeral—everything solid melts into ether(nets). The proliferation of media, information, and telematic technologies in infinitely complex networks creates the new domain of cyberspace, where realities that are the ‘substance’ of our lives appear to vaporize and everything becomes virtual. In this placeless place so-called real time is no longer temporal yet not quite eternal. Glimpsing my face in Windows on terminal screens, I realize that I am no place, perhaps even nowhere.

   When real time interrupts ‘real time,’ the flow stops just long enough for me to realize that the time has come for me to return to the country.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living, pp. 73-74)

In the countryside, Taylor writes and reflects in community with Kierkegaard, with his rock gardens, cites Melville, makes mind-pictures of wildflowers, clouds, reflects on memories. All this and more in order to amplify the knowingness of this text-ure-ing. And so my tipping-point nervousness recedes with the advent of such community, with Mark, reassuring and protective. I know in a way-not-known, by faith, by hope, by love. Tenuous. Scary. But enough, just enough. 

   Outside these windows, the view now blues, less gray, promising dawn, this hint of radiance. 

“‘God and the imagination,’ the poet Wallace Stevens avers, ‘are one.’ To appreciate this rich insight we must expand our notion of the imagination and transform our understanding of God. Wherever form emerges from formlessness or pattern appears in the midst of confusion, the imagination is at work. The imagination is not only within us but is also in the world around us. Theologians have had it wrong for centuries—God is the infinite process in and through which everything arises and passes away.” (Mark C. Taylor, Field Notes, p. 78)

oh shall we believe in life beyond…

Recent readings press into the elusive space/time of faith: beginning-less, end-less…whence?

Gregory of Nyssa summarizes the life of Moses, ascending into his vision of the promised land, as if the release from entering with the troublesome crowd was relief, not loss; as if, already there, beyond.

[Moses] still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.

   Such an experience seems to me to belong to the soul which loves what is beautiful. Hope always draws the soul from the beauty which is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is constantly perceived. . .

   [God] would not have shown himself to his servant if the sight were such as to bring the desire of the beholder to an end, since the true sight of God consists in this, that the one who looks up to God never ceases in that desire. For he says: You cannot see my face, for man cannot see me and live. 

   Scripture does not indicate that this causes the death of those who look, for how would the face of life ever be the cause of death to those who approach it? On the contrary, the Divine is by its nature life-giving… (pp. 114-115, Gregory of Nyssa : The Life of Moses. Trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson)

Included in Morton Kelsey’s Afterlife: The Other Side of Dying is considerable attention to contemporary loss of faith and to the New Testament’s affirmations. He includes a chart showing over 600 “References to Eternal Life, Resurrection, and the Kingdom of God or of Heaven in the New Testament” (p. 160). He quotes John Stanford: “All of this describes the kingdom as a present spiritual reality, but the kingdom as a spiritual reality also has an eschatological character” (p. 162; 274-289).

Finding solace, or even capacity to cope with advancing age and its partner the increasing awareness of death, tends to run into “negative theology” or whatever other language tries not to slide too precipitously off the slippery slope of God—or into.  Perhaps helpful is Don Cupitt’s Mysticism after Modernity:

Negative theology denies that God exists in the everyday sense, but only in order to prepare the way for an affirmation that God nevertheless does exist in some ineffable, inconceivable, higher, and purer sense. God’s Being is so pure that he cannot be thought of as a being, among others. (p. 97)

Particularly relevant to the beyond, David Jasper (noted in the previous blog) quotes Thomas Altizer’s Total Presence: The Language of Jesus :

Genuine solitude is a voyage into the interior, but it is a voyage which culminates in a loss of our interior, a loss reversing every manifest or established center of our interior so as to make possible the advent of a wholly new but totally immediate world…But the real end or reversal of an individual interior makes possible the actual advent of a universal presence, a presence transcending all interior and individual identity, and presenting itself beyond our interior, and beyond every possible interior, as a total and immediate presence. [quoted in The Sacred Desert, p. 182]