Evacuation

“The meaning is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent.”

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“If a man truly loves God, and has no will but to do God’s will, the whole force of the river Rhine may run at him and will not disturb him or break his peace; if we find outward things a danger and disturbance, it comes from our appropriating to ourselves what is God’s.”

Johannes Tauler

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

Matthew 16:25

An examination of genuine contemplative practices reveals a distinct commonality: they all aspire to nothing. This eternal nothing, which paradoxically presents in time as something, is the flower of the interior path; the rose, the pearl, the grail, the gold, the mustard seed, the diamond. Saints and sages often speak in allegory or symbol, because words contain somethingness; how, possibly, could the transcendent, eternal nature of nothingness, be fully encapsulated through the time-bound, horribly relative nature of human language? A stern maxim, frequently conveyed by Krishnamurti, and Huxley, and countless others, is appropriate to mention: “the word is not the thing.”

Entrance into any system of thought requires an acceptance of childlike unknowingness, often dressed up in adult clothing as “first principles” or “axioms,”  before any further inquiry can occur. This, perhaps inconveniently, applies to the very serious man of the world as much as the dreamy idealist. The implied certainty of secularity, or scientific empiricism, asserts that the way that we think, inquire, perceive, and derive knowledge is the only way. Vast systems of “correct thinking,” such as those imparted through standardized education and media, have conditioned men to think, inquire, perceive, and derive knowledge according to very specific methods. The included first principles are often hurriedly glossed over. Accepted methods of scientific inquiry, for example, are undoubtedly useful for a practical, relative understanding of material existence; but, they’re incapable of penetrating into the causal, absolute aspects of phenomena, and they contain a vast “gulf” between the observer and the observed, as described by Owen Barfield.

In essence, we can learn all of the laws, but we have yet to meet the lawmakers.

These methods, and their subsequent products, are not without value. But, perhaps, these methods are not the only paths to knowledge and understanding; perhaps there is more than one way to know and to understand. In an ultimate sense, the Rishi and the atheistic physicist agree on the same fundamental axiom: from singularity, arose near-infinite multiplicity. 

Brahman and the Big Bang; are they really all that different?

All theories, frameworks, abstractions, systems, traditions, doctrines, dogmas, and methods rest upon a universal foundation of unknowingness. Differences only exist in relation to this unknowingness; few systems attempt to return to it, while countless systems move further and further from it. Of course, tremendous relative value, and relative truth, can be derived from moving away from it. But, can anything be claimed to be known for certain, so long as the most fundamental, elementary facts are omitted?

Philosophy is useful to the extent that it leads men closer to right-living. Good thoughts, good words, good deeds. The benefits of a pseudo-Aristotelian, materialist worldview are evident across the globe. Over the past few decades, millions of people have been lifted from abject poverty, have gained access to clean water, electricity, and medicine; many of us enjoy stable logistical infrastructure, consistent housing and nutrition, personal vehicles, and manifold other blessings. But, what value is fruit on a table, when unaccompanied by fruits of the spirit?

I’m conditionally sympathetic toward materialism, and I acknowledge the “density” of practical living; but, matter is not all that I am. I believe that man, in his fullest form, has his feet firmly planted on the ground and his head in the heavens. My interest in this nothingness, “the crags up which the mystics vanish out of my sight,” as C. S. Lewis put it, is not out of spite, or rejection, or repulsion to material life. Rather, it is out of a firm conviction that matter must be vitalized with spirit; the cup must be filled with living waters. Otherwise, we end up with air conditioning and food delivery, but we also end up with hyper-efficient death-dealing automatons and husk-like human beings; Yin and Yang.

I am a pragmatist; but I’m a pragmatist who realizes that “pragmatism,” at the exclusion of unknown potentialities, and real integrities, and divine participation, is a winding foray into darkness; it’s the same old story. I’m wary of man beginning to eclipse God, and the shadows cast as a consequence. I’m wary of the predictable, hubristic insanity of human ambition and spiritual severance. I’m wary of mechanism, at the exclusion of miracles.

The straight and narrow path that leads to God is one of surrender and exposure. It’s an emptying of contents, a sacrificial offering of what once populated the individual, so that something new might take its place, by grace; implicated in this emptying, of course, is a courageous and harrowing plunge into the Unknown.

The structure remains, but the substance is fundamentally different.