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The Unity of All -Non-Dualistic Apophatic Higher States of Consciousness

13 Apr

Non-Dualistic ApophaticHigher States of Consciousness

While Apophatic theology was often in the past regarded as heretical, blasphemy, and unorthodox, we have seen in the previous chapters that now the sciences including physics, cosmology, psychology, biology, ecology, linguistics, as well as meditation, all provide a secure platform for the non-dualistic Apophatic convictions and practice. Apophatic teachings and analysis clearly provide an alternative to the dominant Dualistic Cataphatic dogma. This acceptance and application of the non-dualist perspective is not just an academic survey but a way of living that has crucial truths that benefit the individual, interpersonal, biological, psychological, sociological, spiritual, societal, and ecological levels.

This book is meant to indicate the possibility and rationale that is encompassed in the title of Apophatic. To further explore in-depth the Buddha’s teaching of the Path to Awakening, the reader is referred to my previous books: The Buddha’s Teachings; Seeing Without Illusion, The Buddha’s Radical Psychology: Explorations and The Buddha’s Gift: A Life of Wellbeing and Wisdom.

Now we have the testimony of numerous modern articulate thinkers whose ability to describe their awakening perspectives leads a strong support to past spiritual leaders who, even in the threat of death, spoke their truths out of compassion for others. Remembering the insights of his personal mystical experience, Martin Buber, in his book, The Heart of Mysticism, described his higher states of consciousness: “Now from my own unforgettable experience I know well that there is a state in which the bonds of the personal nature of life seem to have fallen away from us and we experience an undivided unity.”

With this experience of Awakening, Buber understood the world without the alienating and separating dualistic subject/object dichotomy. Like the Buddha, out of compassion for humanity, Buber taught us how to experience and act in a non-alienated way. While Buber always emphasized that he understood relating to the world in an I-It manner, a ‘functional’ relationship between subject and object, is necessary, his primary concern was when a person was unable to respond from I-Thou, thus creating alienation and suffering. The relation between the person and Nothingness is a universal relationship that is found as the foundation for I-Thou, as authentic beings, without objectification. From an apophatic perspective, it is from the background of the I-Thou relation that I-It arises in the foreground.

Virtuous and Kind Behaviors

For this apophatic potential relational world to be realized, virtuous and kind behaviors are encouraged. This promotes sensitivity to the inner and outer world, more serenity, more authenticity, empathy and wisdom with less alienation, rumination, conflict, hatred, and bias.

The ‘I-Thou’ relation participates in the dynamic and living process of Being. That relationship simply Is. Through this relation, we interact with the world in its whole Being. It is not a means to an egocentric objective or goal of use and order but an authentic relationship involving respect and care for the whole being of each subject and existence.

Basic to the Apophatic relation, Lovingkindness or benevolence is a subject-to-subject relationship. Love cannot be an ego-based relation of subject to object but rather a relationship in which all members are subjects and share the immanent unity of Being. According to Buber, the I-Thou relationship is “the existential and ontological reality in which the self comes into being and through which it fulfills and authenticates itself.” This relation is characterized by mutuality and openness, directness, and being in the present.

I-Thou an expression of Inter-being relations

Using Buber’s ‘I-Thou’ as an apophatic example, communication is the fundamental expression of the uniqueness of relation within inter-being. These relational patterns of rapport and affinity are usually found when beings relate with lovingkindness, friendship, openness, and care. I meet you as you are, and you meet me as who I am. In this relationship, I am with you openly in my heart and mind. Living through relationships with this authenticity brings deep satisfaction, happiness and richness in life and opens a greater sense of the original relation with the Being. One easily expresses empathy and compassion, knowing that all are interconnected in unity. Such a perspective makes a different world, a world without violence. As Jesus said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ The Buddha said as well, “All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?”

As all Apophatic sages teach, by being ‘empty’ in the moment, here and now, we experience the wonder of existence. As we have seen in other chapters, the ultimate, even the very idea of the ultimate, cannot be known by discursive thinking. In the now, we live our life as it is. Also, through the practice of silent meditation, we focus on our life awareness. With this awareness, we experience our interconnectedness with all things and empathy and compassion for all sentient beings.

Knowing shatters illusions

Knowing begins with the release of illusions, with dis-illusion. Knowing means to penetrate through the fog, to arrive at reality; knowing means to ‘see’ the reality without illusion. Knowing is that the ‘ownership’ of truth is not possible. The Awakened relationship cannot be explained; it simply is. Through this ‘empty’ relation, we interact with the world in this whole Being. It is not a means to some object or goal but an authentic relationship involving respect for the whole being of each subject. Buber considers ‘I-Thou’ communication the fundamental expression of the uniqueness of relation within inter-being. These relational patterns of rapport and affinity are usually found when beings relate with lovingkindness, friendship, openness, and care.

In the I-Thou encounter, we relate to each other as authentic beings, without inquisition, prejudice, enmity, or predisposition. I meet you as you are, and you meet me as who I am. In this relationship, I am with you openly in my heart and mind. However, there are many people who never fully understand this deeper level of relation. This is tragic because living through relationships based on the non-dualistic perspective brings happiness, deep satisfaction and richness in life and opens a greater sense of the original relation with the Absolute.

When an I-Thou encounter occurs, I am meeting the other as thou with openness, directness, and presence by means of real mutual action, meaning and confirmation. As Buber wrote, “This person is other, essentially other than myself… I confirm it; I wish his otherness to exist, because I wish his particular being to exist.” We are interconnected, “not just with people, but animals too, and stones, clouds, trees” (Aitken 1984, p. 10). We are an integral part of everything.

Nothing exists by itself; nothing has a separate existence, an inherent separate self. As human beings we are Being, one with All. The truth is pure interbeing, beyond dualistic thinking of the alienated mind. Thus, one becomes aware of the impermanence and the Emptiness of the ‘IT’ world. Serenity comes with the acceptance of impermanence and interrelatedness. The insights of such Sages as the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and Master Eckhart show that knowing begins with the awareness of the deceptiveness of our common-sense perceptions and cognitive constructions; our formulations of physical reality do not correspond to what is ‘really real.’ Therefore, most people are half-awake, half dreaming, and are unaware that most of what they hold to be true and self-evident is an ‘magician-like’ illusion produced by the influence of the dualistic alienated world in which they live.

Knowing, then, begins with the transformation of illusions, selfishness, and alienation. Knowing means to penetrate through the fog, to arrive at reality and to ‘see’ the reality without illusion. Knowing is not to own the truth, as possession is not possible, but to Be the truth. The Being mode of knowing allows us, as psychologist Erich Fromm (1992, pp.117-120) also observed, to go beyond ourselves, outside the ego. The Path’s result is kindness to oneself and another, to transcend the barriers that separate us from one another, and living life with recognition of interdependence and impermanence. When communicating at this level, we move beyond biased social roles, identifications, and objectification.

In I-Thou dialogues, we trust and can disclose deep, private aspects of ourselves that enable us to engage in deep and authentic relationships. The rigid, dualistic and egotistically dominated mind remains enmeshed in ignorance, greed, and anger that feeds on itself and, therefore, does not let go and rise above the suffering quagmire in which it remains. This ego rigidity needs an empathetic and compassionate approach to assist it in letting go and coming to know how it is possible to live in a world without the pain and distrust and suffering created through this dualistically based ignorance. And, in fact, the path can be clear and successfully traveled without much difficulty.

What is difficult is allowing oneself to give up the encased hatred, the anger, the greed, the biases of egoism and of selfishness. In the book, Lost Horizon, there is this passage: ‘Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong against each other. The time must come when brutality and the lust for power will perish by their own sword. When that day comes, the world must begin to look for a new life.’

The new life away from that is and always has been pointed to by the apophatic teachers in the past and now. The whole movement is toward the development of maturity of perspective and, therefore, action with wisdom about the way we understand and think about existence. Therefore, incorrect ideas and beliefs must be renounced, which will change our human character and end further suffering.

For as the Buddha and other apophatic teachers have consistently taught, what is now clear through scientific investigation, that living beings, the environment and even the universe are deeply enmeshed and co-dependent on each other. This is one world and every action by all living and non-living forces interact with and alter the previous reality- some more than others. Therefore, once we become experienced, inspired, and apply the truths that the Buddha and others have discovered, and now are explicated in more modern terminology and description, there is a real possibility for a Heaven on Earth without the distraction of seeking supernatural intervention.

Heaven on Earth can briefly be described in a biocentric way as a world of humans acting through wisdom and empathy and compassion, The Buddha, one of the greatest Apophatic teachers, said in his last words to the monks, “It may be that after I am gone that some of you will think, ‘now we have no teacher.’ But that is not how you should see it. Let the Dharma and the discipline that I have taught you be your teacher. All individual things pass away. Strive on, untiringly.”

Now, as we have explored in this book the similar meditation instructions and doctrinal perspectives taught by the many Apophatic spiritual teachers, over time and different cultures, we know we can attain Awakening and know Emptiness and give up our suffering and the harmful consequences of dualistic alienation, for a life of wellbeing and happiness. Let us all assert the Apophatic Way and accomplish knowing the ‘unknowable’ – No-thing

Chapter 16 The Unity of All. Of the Book, God is No-thing. The Apophatic Assertion The
Salvation for Humankind – revised -. Copyright Rodger Ricketts Psy.D.,2022. All rights
reserved.

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Black Elk Speaks…Indigenous Spirituality

8 Apr

Quotes of Black Elk who was a prominent Lakota Sioux visionary and healer, that taught about the connection with the sacredness and oneness of life, and the deep, loving, heart-opening spiritual knowledgethat we carry in our hearts, that is crucial for the coming together of all people as one family.

1.The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Wakan-Taka Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is known that true peace, which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men.

2. At the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit. And that center is really everywhere. It is within each of us.

3. Peace will come to the hearts of men when they realize their oneness with the universe, It is everywhere.

4. Any man who is attached to things of this world is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes of his own passions.

5. As you walk upon the sacred earth, treat each step as a prayer.

6. What is Life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

7. All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.

8. The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and our hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice.

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux by John G. Neihardt

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Oneness isn’t a mystical achievement

1 Feb

Oneness isn’t a mystical achievement or something you arrive at after years of effort; it’s simply what is already happening.

 The effort usually comes from trying to feel connected, when in fact nothing was ever disconnected to begin with.

 We are not in the universe like an object placed inside a container; we are something the universe is doing here and now just as a wave is something the ocean does.

 Our thoughts, our breath, our body, and our relationships are not private events occurring in isolation, but expressions of the same ongoing process that moves clouds, grows trees, and turns seasons.

 When this is seen, and not believed as an idea, but noticed as an experience, the sense of isolation softens.

 Life stops feeling like a personal struggle to justify your place in the world and begins to feel more like participation in a larger movement, a dance you were never outside of, only momentarily imagining you were.

 When we reflect on the idea of oneness, that we aren’t separate objects in a world of other objects but part of a single unfolding process, it can help us understand why events in one place ripple outward and affect people elsewhere.

 The suffering and struggle communities face in any place around the world are not isolated ‘situations happening over there.’ They are part of a larger human system, shaped by shared histories, politics, economics, and our collective choices about how we govern, how we care for one another, and how we respond.

 Seeing through the lens of interconnectedness, we notice that these aren’t isolated headlines: they are expressions of how we still grapple with systems that separate people into categories of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’

Oneness doesn’t mean ignoring real differences or injustices; it means recognizing that every human being’s pain and joy matters, and that the well-being of one community inevitably affects the well-being of others.

 When one group is harmed or denied dignity, the reverberations are felt far beyond that community, shaping how all of us see justice, compassion, and our shared humanity.

 We are not separate, what happens to one place touches the whole and indifference is not neutral.

 To see our interconnectedness is to be quietly, insistently called into responsibility.

 Connection is not a feeling we wait for; for it is something we practice through attention, through refusal, to care.

To resist, in this sense, is not only to oppose violence and injustice where we see it, but to interrupt the habits that allow harm to be normalized, distant, or forgotten. It is to listen, to speak, to show up, to protect one’s other dignity in ways small and structural,

 Resistance rooted in oneness does not harden the heart, it sharpens it. It says: your suffering is not outside my concern; your freedom is bound up with mine. And so we act. Not because we are heroes or saviors but because separation was never real to begin with.

 To connect us is to refuse the lie that some lies are disposable. To resist is to insist, again and again, on a world organized around love and care rather than domination, relationship rather than erasure.

 This is not abstract philosophy it is lived practice. And it begins wherever we are.

 If we take interconnectedness seriously, then awareness alone is not enough,

 Seeing what is happening calls us into action. This means refusing silence when harm is justified or ignored. It means learning, naming what we see, and standing publicly against policies and systems that dehumanize, whether through state violence, displacement, occupation, or enforced poverty.

 Action looks like showing up for communities under attack, amplifying voices that are being erased, demanding accountability from those in power, and materially supporting people on the front lines through mutual aid, organizing and sustained pressure.

 To connect is to commit. To resist is to act in ways that make separation harder to maintain.

 We choose where to spend our money, how we use our platforms, which stories we repeat, and which injustices we refuse to normalize.

 We build networks of care, protect one another, and insist again and again that no one is disposable.

 This is how oneness becomes practice, not theory: through collective action that interrupts harm and moves us toward a world organized around dignity, justice, and shared responsibility.

 Wherever you are, whoever you are, all of us stand eye to eye, stand in love and solidarity with you.

Liberation to all,

Aya Gozawi Faour, Co-Founder, Olive Odyssey

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Irreducible

8 Jan

Union Is in the Heart

Follow the advice of your heart, because no one will be more faithful to you than him. —Book of Sirach, 37.13

 I think that the positive forces that will create our future will not be the forces and the laws of matter, but those of conscious cooperation, comprehension, and love for others that all beings in existence must sooner or later manifest because these values are the essence of our deepest nature.

I also think that the most effective way to achieve union is through a process of collective and cooperative creation of a just, empathic, and loving society through right and courageous actions informed by the heart and by the intuitive and rational mind. Then our experience and knowing will grow in our hearts and they will guide our individual actions through an ever-higher level of consciousness.

Unfortunately, today there is the real danger of letting ourselves be seduced by the spreading culture of digital ontology and digital consumerism that replaces true and profound relationships with virtual and superficial ones, thus halting, if not reversing, our spiritual development.

Social networks designed to bombard people with suggestive messages, often personalized to reinforce personal biases or based on false information or on presumed conspiratorial theories, generate groups that can become alienated from reality in self-isolating worlds. Nikola Tesla said that “progress must serve to improve the human race; if not, it is only a perversion.”

Technology must be used to help us discover our true nature, not to further imprison us in meaningless virtual worlds designed to enrich the richest. We have come to the point where we can truly unite as humans no matter where we were born, or stay divided in warring factions with ever increasing destructive technology on our side. Only when we truly comprehend that we are responsible for our experiences and that the choice is ours alone, can we begin to truly know ourselves and the world.

To know ourselves more and more, we need a new empathic science that can convert scientific knowledge into deep lived knowing and from it generate new scientific knowledge. Similarly, we need a new rational spirituality that can convert lived knowing into new scientific knowledge and from it generate new lived knowing. These two disciplines can then intertwine in endless and mutual crescendo.

This is the essence of the Creative Principle of One. Within this vision, empathic science and rational spirituality, integrating and interweaving, will evermore increase our loving, joyful, and fulfilling union with the Whole.

Federico Faggin

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This universal force is LOVE.

3 Jan

Dear Lieserl, Your father Albert Einstein

In the late 1980s, Lieserl, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University. This is one of them, for Lieserl Einstein.

I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

This universal force is LOVE.

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force. Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it. Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die. Love is Divine and Divine is Love.This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will. To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation.If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.

After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer. Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet. However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.

I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer! “.

Your father Albert Einstein’

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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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