On Silence and Speechlessness

On Silence and Speechlessness

My fondest wish when I wrote my little essay was that others would comment, so that I would be able to learn more.  My fondest wish has been been granted several times already.

The following comment  (by PB) fills out my scant knowledge of the history of apophasis.  It also gives us a much fuller grasp of “silence”, of “speechlessness” by pointing us past the phenomenal.

Karen Armstrong has long been a favourite of mine because of the depth, accessibility and inclusiveness of her writings.  It was a treat to be introduced to William Franke.

Your essay nicely captures the rise and fall of reason, logic, language, science, and fundamentalist religions, all handmaidens to the ego, in their attempts to define religion, God and humans in their fullness.

Science et al focuses on the phenomenal. They are, by definition, incapable of dealing with that which is beyond the phenomenal. They focus on measuring, comparing and contrasting, in other words, dualism, and are incapable of dealing with Oneness or One without an other, aka God.

Jesus, of course, pointed this out, in reminding us to “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21 KJV).

It is only at the outer limits of quantum mechanics where sense perception gives way to more subtle avenues that science and religion meet and agree. Your essay touches on this on page 7 and again on page 10. Any other scientific approach results only in an infinite regression, at best, in its attempts to explore religion and God.

Rendering unto Caesar is also the essence of apophatic theology. Indeed, the term “apophatic theology” is an oxymoron because this approach implicitly rejects theology and philosophy as paths to God.  Instead it invites the practitioner to directly experience the Divine and how it flows through and informs the universes and all in it.

Apophatic theology denies that aspects or attributes said to be of God as are actually indicative of God.  Its approach assumes that God is ineffable and that attempts to apply human characteristics to God, such as existence or non-existence, are not only inadequate but misleading.

Because God is indivisible, everywhere all the time, attempts to ascribe attributes to God are only references to an aspect of God as perceived by humans who have locked themselves into the notion of a phenomenal world.

The idea of apophatic “theology” is to eliminate that which God is not and also to eliminate related ways of characterizing God until there is full intuitive or contemplative awareness of God directly.

This method of non-identification with God qualities includes a gradual non-identification with the qualities of phenomenal world. It seeks not only to eliminate all limiting concepts about God but also to eliminate all limiting ideas about the seeker, including a consciousness that limits wisdom.  Apophatic “theology” is the process establishing a change in the consciousness of the seeker so that he/she becomes aware that they already are that which they seek.   

Your essay refers to all this either directly or indirectly.

This spiritual path is known variously as the Via Negativa path of Roman Catholicism; the Jnana Yoga path of Hinduism; the Lahoot Salbi  path of Islam, found principally in the Shia and Sufi paths; the Ein-sof aspect of Judaism, plus Buddhism and Taoism or Daoism.

The Via Negativa path to the Divine has been practiced for many millenia by all religions. It is the mystical or contemplative approach to the Divine leading to the common core of all religions. 

I’m not sure that I agree that apophatic theology began with Denys the Areopagite as stated on page 3. That certainly isn’t true for non-Christian religions. For Christianity there are the earlier examples of the desert fathers and the hesychasm tradition as well as the Cappadocian Fathers, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Gregory of Nyssa.

Throughout the essay are references to apophatic theology’s emphasis on self-emptying and speechlessness and on the ineffability, incomprehensibility, inconceivablitiy, unsayability, of the Divine:

On page 2 you mention that negative theology is “an admission at crucial moments that we simply do not know” and that apophatic comes from the Greek meaning “unsayable”.  Being “unsayable” does not mean that we are not capable of full awareness of the divine. 

On page 3 you reference Karen Armstrong’s citing of a Chinese sage that negative theology “enables a person to step outside the prism of ego and experience the sacred”.  But on page 4, Armstrong is said to remark that the reduction of talk to silence is really what theology is about. This latter idea is only partially true because silence is only an avenue that gets the core apophatic process started that leads to direct experience of the sacred.

On page 5, an attempt is made to equate kenosis or “self emptying” with being speechless. But self emptying refers not only to speechlessness but also to having no mental content, in other words, adopting a consciousness radically different from that employed when dealing with the phenomenal world.

Hinduism and Sikhism have a concept of Anhad Naad,  silent sound or unstruck sound. This “sound” without an external vibration is the sound of the cosmos and human consciousness. (Sikhnet and The Hindu Forum of India Divine) From this comes OM or AUM that not only codifies the ineffability of the universe but also the chanting of which changes and attunes the consciousness so that one becomes aware of this unstruck sound and of God.

Zen Buddhism has its own version of this. The answer to the famous koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is God Consciousness.

Your essay points out that the tension or paradox between knowing and self-emptying or between knowledge and direct experience or direct apprehension is resolved by William Franke’s observation of the two limits of language and that root of language is beyond words. Franke’s comments lead to the concept of the ineffability of humans and provides a direct link to the ineffability of the Divine and the correspondence of humanity with the sacred.

Franke argues that a “richly diverse world” has unity of love or compassion. But love, unity, and compassion are our egoic perceptions of the presence of the Divine in ourselves and our phenomenal worlds. Such adjectives are the opposite of via negative and keep us from the divine.

Your essay effectively skewers deism and its egocentric origins, which along with science and economics are in the process of causing the disappearance of humanity through greed-driven climate change.

The stress of extinction may be the spur to taking a renewed interest in apophatic theology.

Apophatic theology provides a remedy to egoism but is not new.  The post-modern rise of apophatic theology reflects the sentiments of the song, Everything Old is New Again, by Peter Allen and Carole Bayer Sager:

            Don't throw the past away


  You might need it some rainy day


                                                Dreams can come true again


                                                When everything old is new again

One can only be unmindful of one’s sacred nature for so long. Ultimately, our spiritual core makes itself felt. We may try to hang on to our initial glimpses of the sacred but assigning descriptors to them. That is kataphatic theology. By definition, it is about something and so always keeps us separate (and estranged) from that sacred something. It is only later, that some decide not to apply descriptors but rather to experience the sacred in all their moments on earth.

“Dearest Friends,” Laurence Freeman OSB

An excerpt from “Dearest Friends,” Laurence Freeman OSB in the Newsletter of the World Community for Christian Meditation, Vol 32, No. 3, September 2008, p. 4.

When the force of faith is set free in the human person it impels us to experience reality beyond words, images, and ideas. We then discover that the filters of metaphor, however useful and necessary they may be at one level, can also (and need to) be deactivated if faith is to grow. Like all human universals we grow in faith or faith wilts and dies. Faith contains the eternal yearning we all have to see reality just as it is. “Brothers and sisters,” said St John, “what we shall be like we do not know but we do know that when Christ appears we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is. As he is pure, all who have grasped this hope make themselves pure.” (1Jn 3:2-3) To see God is to become like God. Purity is the condition of this vision. In much of religion, though, where faith is restricted to belief or ritual, purity means piling on the filters, adding to the intervening layers. At the core of each religion, however, is the ineradicable mystical knowledge that ultimate purity is a 20-20 vision of reality, unfiltered and unmediated by metaphor. Most of us never fully attain it but the intuition that this is so is part of the deep nature of faith itself. 

To see reality as it is, or at least to free oneself progressively of some of the filters, is a major act of faith. It expresses the trusting face of faith because our attachment to the beliefs and rituals of our tradition (rather than the beliefs and rituals in themselves) become a false and falsifying security. And so, many deeply religious people feel an aversion or antipathy to meditation because it seems to (and indeed does) undermine the secure boundaries that protect our world view and our sense of being superiorly different from others. 

A way of faith, however, is not a dogged adherence to one point of view and to the belief systems and ritual traditions that express it. That would make it just ideology or sectarianism, not faith. Faith is a transformational journey that demands that we move in, through and beyond our frameworks of belief and external observances—not betraying or rejecting them but not being entrapped by their forms of expression either. St Paul spoke of the Way of salvation as beginning and ending in faith. Faith is thus an open-endedness, from the very beginning of the human journey. Naturally, we need a framework, a system and tradition. [But] if we are stably centered in these, the process of change unfolds and our perspective of truth and our faith are continuously enlarged. 

After Meditation, “Who Said This?” by Mary Oliver in RED BIRD ( Boston: Beacon, 2008), p. 58. 

Something whispered something

that was not even a word.

It was more like a silence

that was understandable.

I was standing

at the edge of the pond.

Nothing living, what we call living,

was in sight.

And yet, the voice entered me,

my body-life,

with so much happiness.

And there was nothing there

but the water, the sky, the grass.

Carla Cooper at cmcooper@gvtc.com

Knowing and unknowing in the 21st century – in search of new narratives

Knowing and unknowing in the 21st century – in search of new narratives

“ ... for this enigma [of life] he finds partial answers—each story he tells is one— yet each answer, each story, uncovers another question, and so he is continually failing and this failure maintains his curiosity. Without mystery, without curiosity and without the form imposed by a partial answer, there can be no stories—only confessions,3

communiques, memories and fragments of autobiographical fantasy which for the moment pass as novels.”  (John Berger A Story for Aesop1)

We are in the throes of an unprecedented catastrophic crisis: spiritual, productive, financial, economical, ecological; endemic conflict and war. I am convinced that this crisis will lead to unavoidable social collapse on a global scale. Inarguably the crisis is due to our modern narratives: our core perspective that humanity is separate and apart from nature; our hubric vision that through reason and technology we can dominate and control nature; our illusion that we can have unrestrained growth on a finite planet – an illusion that is the foundation of our capitalistic drive to commodify every social relationship. This modern narrative underpins our postmodern world.

Buddhist and other spiritual traditions assert that insight into the emptiness of self can only be gained experientially; kenosis (self-emptying) cannot be reached through intellectual assent. An authentic experience of kenosis could launch one along a trajectory from egocentric, to anthropocentric and beyond to ecocentric. I speculate that an authentic experience of kenosis could be reached through a nontheistic apophatic exercise; an apophatic exercise akin to Denys' exercise or the Brahmodya competition, but one that challenges our modern narratives and philosophical constructs. What would such a contemporaneous practice be like in our postmodern world?

While I am convinced that social collapse is unavoidable, I believe that there is hope for the present and for the future. There is hope if we can create new narratives. There is hope if we can create a new mythos that decenters the individual, decenters the species and reconnects us to the sacred; an immanent sacred in the mundane world, not a transcendent sacred “within” or “out there”. We are the stories that we tell and the stories that tell us. With these new narratives and a new ecocentric mythos we can live as beings of this world connected to it and dependent on it, rather than as disenchanted

1 http://www.raleighcharterhs.org/faculty/sbusonik/BergerStoryForAesop.pdf

                                    4

beings in this world striving to dominate it and transcend it.

Losing your self to find your Self

Losing your self to find your Self

I am intrigued by the following questions: (1) “Is apophatic theology simply an apologia in which one does not make affirmative or positive statements?” (2) “Does apophatic refer to the ineffable in the sense of simply being beyond words or indescribable?” Or, (3) “Is apophasis a much more radical concept, or exercise, in which we viscerally experience the ineffable by pushing ourselves to our cognitive limits, exhausting our abilities to comprehend and being reduced to stunned silence – the unsayable?”

Question (1) suggests a simple rhetorical style. Question (2) suggests that apophatic could be little more than intellectual assent. I don't have access to Franke's book at this time. However, Armstrong's description of Denys' exercise and the Brahmodya competition suggests that when apophasis is experienced at its most challenging and experienced at its most rewarding that it is akin to what is described in question (3). Question (3) points to something that rings true and that could be personally transformative.

Armstrong finds commonalities with Catholic apophatic theology in diverse religious and spiritual traditions – pagan, Taoist, Brahmanical, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Judaic. It strikes me that apophasis is applicable also in a non-theological context to exploring the aporias of philosophical enquiry and discourse more generally; that apophasis could be a powerful tool in the context of immanent critique.

My exposure to via negativa is in the context of Buddhism. In Buddhist phenomenology a person comprises five skandhas (literally heaps or aggregates): form (the material body and sense organs), sensation (feeling; positive, negative or neutral), perception, mental formations (mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, prejudices, compulsions) and consciousness. That is a person is a composite of various physical and psychological elements. This Buddhist perspective challenged the prevailing Brahmanical view of an enduring, substantive Self (atman).

In analytic (in contrast to contemplative) meditation one “searches” for the Self among the skandhas and comes up empty-handed. From this enquiry, Buddhists draw the ontological conclusion that the Self is empty (shunyata). The conclusion that the Self is empty is often stated enigmatically by contemporary Buddhist (these statements seem to be ubiquitous and are made by representatives of all contemporary Buddhist schools: Zen, Tibetan, Thai Forest etc) as “egolessness”, “no-self”, or that the “self does not exist”. My transition in the previous sentence from upper case “Self” to lower case “self” is intentional, and is meant to emphasize the conflation by contemporary Buddhist of the Brahmanical concept of Self (atman) with the western philosophical and psychological notion of self, ego and individuation.

In the Madhyamika Buddhist literature the concept of shunyata [emptiness, void, not-Self (anatman)] is expressed by stating that self is “dependently-originated”, or arises from multiple “causes and conditions”. This is not to deny the psychological or phenomenological experience of a self, or to claim that a self does not exist. Rather it is a statement that the self is impermanent and does not exist as a singular, fixed, stable, independent entity. Or in contemporary language, “not-self” or “emptiness

of self” means that the self is contingent. In the Mahayana tradition, the argument that the self is empty is generalized from the individual to all phenomena: all things are said to be empty of inherent existence. One of the most concise Mahayana statements of the concept of the emptiness of all phenomena is summarized in The Sutra of the Heart of Transcendent Knowledge http://nalandatranslation.org/media/Heart-Sutra.pdf For a brief summary of key terms in the Heart Sutra which may help to open up what at first sight appears to many as an obscure text, see http://nalandatranslation.org/media/Notes-to-Sutra-of-the-Heart-of-Transcendent- Knowledge.pdf A familiarity with the Buddhist concepts and teachings referred to in the Heart Sutra reveals that the Heart Sutra is a breath taking statement of “knowing and not knowing”.

The Buddhist notion of the emptiness of self and more generally of all phenomena is strikingly similar to Hume's bundle theory of self and objects; namely that the self is a bundle of perceptions that are in perpetual flux and that objects cannot be distinguished from their properties.

The routine misperception of fleeting, contingent phenomena as a permanent, enduring self leads to our dualistic perspective in which things appear to us as either objective (external, empirically accessible), or subjective (internal, accessible to consciousness). That is we relate to the world by constructing a self as a permanent, stable and unchanging locus of experience from which we navigate the complexities of our world. And many indeed, find the notion of the emptiness of self every bit as challenging and undermining as Hume was for Kant.

Christian Agnosticism

“Christian Agnosticism”

I'm fairly far removed from the various theological currents of our times, and so the notion of "negative theology" was a new one for me. But in many ways, it wasn't: I just employ different language for it. I've long thought of myself as a "Christian agnostic." While learn about the sacred through the Christian tradition, I've always had a profound respect for how much we can't, and never will, know. (It should be no surprise that the Book of Job is my favourite biblical text). Scholastic debates over finer theological points suggest a hubris that is unbecoming. And the binding of belief into institutionalized orthodoxies is anathema to me. "God" will not be found in either. To me, we can never "know" God, in any rationale sense. But we can experience something that speaks of what God is: and that is love. The experience of giving and receiving of love, to me, provides us with our best peek behind the curtain, into that "great beyond" - into the soul of the Creation that Job finally concedes he will never be capable of understanding. We enter into unity with it when we enter fully into relationship - with ourselves, with others, and with the Christ.

Seeking the God within

                        Seeking the God within           

Armstrong - myth comes to us not by thought but disciplined practice. For me, this is the heart of the matter. What is the disciplined practice? How can we, who practice, reach God not out there, but in the depths of our consciousness. The experience of the ineffable doesn't arise in us just because we

have the desire, although that is important. Just to add to this. We live in a society loaded with incoming information from all sides. This info results in thought after thought after thought, most of them useless. We have, though, become addicted to the media that feeds us and gives us the high. Coming to the deepest level of being requires a commitment to an inner life that does not exclude thought but sees thoughts for what they are and what they do. She says that the reduction of thought to silence is really what theology is about. Right on. However, allowing that silence to arise is also part of the practice, and what comprises that practice?

Abandon the modern appetite for certainty. I think this is where the argument I had with you over hope enters. Not only is life, itself, impermanent, but so is everything else in the relative world.

            Reminds me of some lines from TS Eliot:

I say to the soul, be still and wait without hope. For hope would be for the wrong thing. For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

These point to being open to whatever comes and accept whatever is. We might as well since we don't know. The impermanence and uncertainty of life in all it's aspects remind us that thereis no other way to happiness or contentment.            Religion, spiritual life, as Armstrong points out, does not provide us with the answers but does enable us to live creatively, etc. in the midst of the uncertainty. When she talks about joy, peace, etc., she is referring, I think, not to ideas and thoughts but experience which can flow from thoughts. The true experience of anything is ineffable, can not be described. Like more modern poetry, the important element is not description, but the experience ones has when reading the poem, an indescribable experience. Again, she talks about engagement. The challenge in an age when we are more bombarded with ideas, etc. is how to....something religions needs to take seriously.

In the ultimate sphere, awareness of the ineffable God, more than hope, but faith that yes, there are moments when I can experience this "formless Awareness, or Presence. When she says again that religion is a practical discipline and its insights are derived from spiritual exercises,etc....I wonder what she advises for engaging in that discipline. When she asks, What is the question we ask - it's about what we desire most. That can really take us on a long, long journey.

Libertarian relativism?

One reader commented on the paragraph that ends” To draw the line anywhere on what is tolerable … is to take a step toward Auschwitz.”  Was this an example of liberal relativism?

I had – rather too hastily – suggested that there were limits set on tolerance by criminal law.   I should have taken the time to work through the delicate balance between tolerance (or, better, compassion) and justice.  Either is incomplete without the other. 

Over the past three hundred years a series of philosophers have developed the argument that justice makes universal demands: there is no escaping the obligations of justice.  Yet, as Martha Nussbaum has recently argued, humans in their everyday lives do not simply obey the universal, intellectual demands of justice, but must be motivated emotionally to respect those demands.  Compassion provides that motivation, even though compassion and justice might pull a person in different directions in some circumstances.  (A mother, for instance, hiding a miscreant son from the police.)

So while there are limits to compassion, it is usually compassion that motivates people to observe the demands of justice.