Chapter 2 The God is No-Thing An Apophatic Assertion: An Introduction for Humankind’sTranspersonal Actualization– revised

Chapter 2 The God is No-Thing An Apophatic Assertion: An Introduction for Humankind’s
Transpersonal Actualization– revised -. Copyright Rodger Ricketts Psy.D.,2023. All rights
reserved. Protected by international copyright conventions. No part of this chapter may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, without
express permission of the Authorpublisher, except in case of brief quotations with due
acknowledgement. Publisher CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Chapter 2

Via Negativa and Via Positiva

In this chapter, I will highlight what more I learned about apophatic theology or
apophaticism. Those new readings introduced me to Western and other apophatic
writers, resulting in my defining the Buddha’s teachings as an example of an
apophatic perspective. There are clear similarities between the Buddha’s writing
and those of Angelus Silesius and other apophatic theologists. While there is
already some scholarship about this similarity, it is, unfortunately, rarely discussed
in mainstream Buddhist or theistic literature. This lack of discussion prompted me
to integrate relevant aspects of my previous writings on the Buddha’s teachings
with fascinating apophatic perspectives and to highlight what I believe are
important parallels.
In the past, I read some works of Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart
and the book The Cloud of Unknowing, but I was never specifically introduced to
the apophatic tradition. This past year, as I read the apophatic works of Angelus
Silesius and Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, I realized that the Buddha’s
teachings could be correctly considered apophatic. This realization opened a new
dimension of comprehension and relevance for me about what I had written in my
previous books and essays on the Buddha’s teachings. First, let us understand the
differences between cataphatic and apophatic theology or via positiva and via
negativa–

Tags: Apophatic Teachings, Buddhism, Knowledge, psychology, reality