Originally posted by whodey
This is an interesting perspective. I interpret this perspective to mean that one attains a deep spiritual connection with the material universe. Am I correct? From your vantage point, is there nothing outside the realm of the material universe or is there more to it than that?
Not really (i.e., as in being correct 🙂 ). When most people use the word “supernatural,” they seem to mean some entity that “exists” outside the natural realm (whatever exactly that means). I am using the word “transcendent” to refer to whatever transcends our capacity to conceptualize—as a mundane example, my cat seems unable to conceptualize my pointing at something: he always looks at my finger. By dispensing with a concept of supernaturalism that I frankly find incoherent, I am not asserting materialism. I am asserting one reality which is ultimately a whole: a “totality without an edge,” as scottishinnz put it once.
At bottom, you have two choices: dualism or non-dualism. In dualism, God is a being among other beings, even if that God is the superest of all beings and, in fact, the creator of the others. One of the incoherencies about this concept is that it seems to assert a figure (God as a being) without a ground. If there is a ground, it is “larger” than such a God and encompasses such a God; and if there is no such ground that encompasses both that God and other beings, relationship between that being and the others is not possible.
In non-dualism, God (for those traditions that use that word) is the ground and source of everything that is, as the ocean is the ground and source of the individual waves that are manifest on its surface. The waves are no more separable from the ocean—from which they arise, of which they are, and to which they return—than my smile is separable from my face. That does not mean that any single (conscious) wave can comprehend the whole of the ocean. It can, however, be in conscious communion with it—or he or she. But such communion takes place at a non-conceptual or pre-conceptual state of awareness (quite a natural state, once one can learn to allow the conceptualizing mind to relax—easier said than done!). [Note that we are always, in a sense, in communion—I liked your word “mingled”—but the realization of that communion is “veiled” by the activity of our thinking mind.]
Once we begin to conceptualize—which of course we will do—once we begin to try to describe it, we are already mentally standing back from it, so to speak. It is rather like trying to describe to yourself an orgasm while in the midst of it: you have already divided your attention from the full experience itself. Few, if any, can sustain a perpetual state of (physical or spiritual) orgasm: hence the metaphorical phrase in my poem, “the rhythm of form and fullness and form.”
I no longer think that I can describe “the ground” at all—and in expressing the experience of communion, I have to use symbols and metaphors and paradox and such. That is, my experience is always participatory—I am always included, inescapably so. Hence my comments above about religious language in general being either evocative or aesthetic (which I think has to be true even within a dualistic theological understanding).
Door 69
19 Jun '07 06:14
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