Tag Archives: Apophatic Teachings

Non-Duality: What the World Needs Now

14 Feb

Preface

After 40 years of active study and practice of the Buddhist teachings and having written four books on what I call Buddha inspired psychology, I recently found a very insightful perspective that elaborated on what I had learned before. The insight is that the Buddhist teachings are a mysticism, which inherently undercuts any easy attempts at codification. Therefore, union with the divine or emptiness is experienced rather than defined and categorized through limited language. such an emphasis on first-hand experience runs contrary to abstract, ‘positive’ cataphatic theology. this book is the unique and cogent perspective that incorporates the Buddhist teachings as a ‘negative’ apophatic theology.

While there are some scholarly books and research articles on the topic of apophatic theology, very few incorporate the Buddha’s teachings. I hope to show in this book that indeed Buddhist teachings and wisdoms are succinctly integrated into this apophatic spiritual tradition that spans cultures and time. Within the larger scope of the typology of ‘via negative’, the Buddhist teachings of nothingness or emptiness or Sunyata are clearly a part of the apophatic spiritual tradition.

Therefore, this book goes beyond what is usually taught in traditional Buddhist texts. My aim is to make accessible from a modern perspective what the Buddha was universally teaching for those who are on their own spiritual path of personal discovery.

–I have always been struck by the universal applicability of the Buddha’s teachings, which transcend geographical and temporal constraints. The integration of these teachings with proponents of apophatic theology has only reinforced my belief in their universality. Despite four decades of rigorous research, temple retreats, lectures, and meditation practice, it is only now that I have uncovered this enlightening connection between the Buddha’s teachings and the apophatic traditions. It is my sincere desire to share this newfound insight with my fellow spiritual seekers.

-I have always appreciated that the Buddha taught universal truths that are applicable everywhere and throughout time. Integration of these truths with other teachers of the Apophatic theology has affirmed my belief in this universality of the Buddha’s teachings. Even with my forty years of research studies, attendance of temple retreats with monks and lay lectures and meditation practice, I have only now found this instructive link between the Buddha’s teachings with other teachers of the Apophatic tradition, and I want to share this with my fellow spiritual path voyagers. I believe they will also find it as interesting and illuminating as I have.

The Apophatic emphasis on firsthand experience hence knowledge, stands in stark contrast to abstract, ‘positive’ cataphatic theology. This latest work of mine presents a unique and compelling perspective that positions the Buddha’s teachings firmly within a ‘negative’ apophatic theological framework.

While there are scholarly works and research articles on apophatic theology, very few incorporate the profound teachings of the Buddha. In this book, I aim to demonstrate how Buddha’s wisdom can be seamlessly integrated into this spiritual tradition that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries. Within the broader context of the ‘via negativa’ typology, the Buddhist concepts of nothingness, emptiness, or Sunyata are undeniably intertwined with the apophatic spiritual tradition. It is my sincere desire to share this newfound insight with my fellow spiritual seekers.

Rodger R Ricketts

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More Apophatic Quotes…

23 Sep

God is “incomprehensible and immeasurable, beyond the grasp of the human mind.” “Human minds cannot behold God as He is in Himself” Origen of Alexandria

“He is celebrated by all beings according to the analogy that all things bear to him as their Cause. But the most divine knowledge of God, that in which he is known through unknowing, according to the union that transcends the mind, happens when the mind, turning away from all things, including itself, is united with the dazzling rays, and there and then illuminated in the unsearchable depth of wisdom” “The most Godlike knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing.” Pseudo Dionysius

theology does “not start by making the assumption of defining God; as St John Damascene remarks, In God we cannot say what he is” “What God actually is always remains hidden from us. And this is the
highest knowledge one can have of God in this life, that we know Him to be above every thought that we are able to think of Him” Thomas Aquinas

“Entering the darkness that surpasses understanding, we shall find ourselves brought, not just to brevity of speech, but to perfect silence and unknowing.” philosopher-monk

“what He is by His essence and nature, this is altogether beyond our comprehension and knowledge” John of Damascus

“He who thinks that God is not comprehended, by him God is comprehended; but he who thinks that God is comprehended knows him not,God is unknown to those who know him and is known to those who do not know him at all.” Kena Upanishads

“The essence of your knowledge of Him, O my brother, is your firm admission that you are completely ignorant of His true essence” Baya ibn Pakudah

“In the contemplation of His essence, our comprehension and knowledge prove insufficient; in the examination of His works, how they necessarily result from His will, our knowledge proved to be ignorance, and in the endeavour to extol Him in words, all our efforts in speech are mere weakness and failure” Maimonides

“From the sayings of some early kabbalists, it is apparent that they are careful not even to ascribe personality to God. Since He is beyond everything—beyond even imagination, thought, or will—nothing can be said of him that is within the grasp of our thought” Gershom Scholem

God is “above and beyond all categories of human thought and imagination, for He is beyond all that they describe of Him” (Q. 6:100b, cited in Nasr 1987:314). He is One Who“cannot be comprehended by vision” (Q. 6:101); “Vision comprehendeth Him not,but He comprehendeth [all] vision.” He is One Incomparable: “There is naught like unto Him” (Q.42:11; cf. 16:60; 32:27). He is supremely “All-High, Transcendent or Exalted” (al-`alíy Q. 4:34; 22:62; 31:30). Qur‘án

‘The Divine Essence (al-dhát al-iláhiyya) cannot be understood by the rational faculty”. “The Divine Essence is transcendent above the cosmos, independent of the worlds” Ibn `Arabá

“none knows Allah with a real knowledge but He Himself; for every known falls necessarily under the sway and within the province of the Knower” Abu Hámid al-Ghazali

“Regard thou the one true God (ḥaqq) as One Who is apart from, and immeasurably exalted above, all created things. The whole universe reflects His glory, while He is Himself independent of, and transcendeth His creatures. This is the true meaning of Divine Unity(tawḥíd)” Baha’

“Immeasurably exalted is His Essence above the descriptions of His creatures… The birds of men’s hearts, however high they soar, can never hope to attain the heights of His unknowable Essence… Far be it from His glory that human pen or tongue should hint at His mystery, or that human heart conceive His Essence” Bahá’u’lláh

“The Formless Way: We look at it and do not see it; it is invisible. We listen to it and do not hear it; it is inaudible. We touch it and do not feel it; it is intangible. These three elude our inquiries and merge into one.” “The unity is said to be the mystery. Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders.” Laozi

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Apophatic Quotes

21 Sep

“By religious feeling, what I mean altogether independently of anydogma, credo, organization of the Church, Holy Scripture, the hope of personal salvation, etc.—the simple and direct fact of a feeling of the‘eternal.’ This feeling is, in truth, subjective in nature. It is a contact.” Romain Rolland

“‘God’ must be free of properties and is thus unlike anything else, and indescribable.”Moses Maimonides

“an unqualifiable and attribute-less is the nature of ‘God.’”Mulla Rajab

“If you understand, it is not God.” St. Augustine or Augustine of Hippo

“The Tao [the absolute principle underlying the universe] that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The
name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth.”Lao Tzu

“God has no form, no shape, no color, no differences, no race, no religion, no country, no place, no name, neither beginning nor end. God is the grace that lives within all lives.”Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

“You should love [God] as he is a non-God, a non-spirit, a non-person, a non-image, but as he is a pure, unmixed bright ‘One,’ separated from all dualities; and in that One we should eternally sink down, out of something into nothing.” Meister Eckhart

“The name Christ, an unknown significance, just as the title ‘God’ is not a name, but represents the idea, innate in human nature, of an inexpressible reality” Justin Martyr

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Join with the Holy Spirit

19 Jul

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Veiled Reality: Affirmations of the Apophatic from Physics

6 May

Chapter 9 Veiled Reality: Affirmations of the Apophatic from Physics – 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.

We have seen that science supports the apophatic assertion that a
transcendent reality is beyond the normal range of human perception
and conceptualization. Yet, at the same time, the Transcendent is a
reality in the human life process. We have also seen that awakening or
transcending the ignorance of duality is a common experience of the
mystic. I will now highlight how the theoretical physicist Bernard
d’Espagnat argues that we cannot directly know the transcendental
reality or mind-independent reality:
When, in its spirit, quantum theory and Bell’s theorem are used as
touchstones, the two main traditional philosophical approaches,
realism, and idealism, are found wanting. A more suitable
conception seems to be an intermediate one, in which the mere
postulated existence of a holistic and hardly knowable Mind Independent Reality is found to have explaining power. […] This model considers Reality as not lying in space and time, indeed
being a priori to both, and it involves the view that the great
mathematical laws of physics may only let us catch some glimpses
on the structures of the Mind-Independent Reality.
(On Physics and Philosophy (2006) vol. 41)
D’Espagnat calls this model “veiled reality” to suggest that the
mind-independent reality, like the transcendental of transcendental
idealism, is, for the most part, unconceptualizable. “Veiled reality”
refers to a “world” independent of human perception, brain structure,
and the language of our minds’ participation in knowledge. D’Espagnat,
as well as others, also assert that we are directly involved in this
actuality; we exist in it. We are an integral part of the actual. We are
“swimming” in it. Reality is not a specific area of the universe that
exists separate from our senses. Our limitation is that we have the
capacity to delineate only an exceedingly small aspect of it.
As the Buddha taught, d’Espagnat explains that sense impressions
and sensations are genuine, as are our sense organs. In sight and color,
both the photons or waves, as well as the retinal cones are actual and
their interactions create our vision. The same is true of our other
sensations. This is the middle way of understanding our place in reality.
We do not have to seek our participation in it; we are a part of it.
However, in our dualistically based ignorance, we normally take our
cognitive representations, or pictures of reality, to be reality itself.
However, under certain meditative conditions, we can understand how
our subject/object dualistic world creates this illusion—the illusion that
is our ignorance.

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

25 Apr

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–

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