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.
When the monk Malunkyaputta decided to ask questions to the Buddha ‘These theories have been left unexplained by the Lord,’ and he asked them all dualistically arranged. He expressed them this way, “Is the world eternal, or not?” Almost binary in its dualism, the answers must be dualistic. As they speak to relative reality, one reason often cited as to why the Buddha would not answer these questions is that any answer, regardless of what those answers were, would reinforce dualism: me-you, space-time, object, and subject. So, Buddha not only left his answers “undeclared” because they would set back the unlearned practice with notions of duality, but also because they have no validity nor benefit to achieve Awakening, Attaching to relative reality and duality is one of the causes of not Awakening.
Instead, at a non-dualistic level, one knows Oneness. Oneness or the concept of Emptiness is about all things —including every atom in the “infinite” or the “non-infinite” universe (whichever it is.) The apophatic tradition emphasizes the unity, wholeness, interdependence, and interconnectedness of all things. In distinction from the dualism of the unanswerable questions, there are intuitions about realities that transcend the systems of categories in our human thought and language. They are matters which, in St Paul’s words, ‘No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived’ (I Corinthians 2:9). Instead, apophatic theology refers to the subject matter of these unanswerable questions as mysteries, as matters that are beyond human comprehension and expression. Also, they recognize that the endless pursual of logical and rational thinking about these mysteries is useless and instead, makes it impossible to attain Awakening or Emptiness.
The sciences are left to do their own legitimate study of finding out what the physical universe is composed of, and how it works. However, the Buddha would not have endorsed any attempts to aspects of physics or scientific cosmology, as a new form of natural theology leading ‘from science to God’. In another essay, I explore more in-depth why that is true. ‘Both the physicist and the mystic want to communicate their knowledge, and when they do so with words their statements are paradoxical and full of logical contradictions.’ Beyond Language, Fritjof Capra.
Nor, would he have supported the struggles of theologians over the centuries, who have developed complex Cataphatic systems of doctrine about the positive attributes of God. For the Buddha, all such dogmas come under the heading of speculative views, the pursuit of which is not relevant to finally understanding our immanent relationship with Awakening.
It is remarkably difficult for human beings to overcome the illusion of dualism. Mostly there is very little promoted to break down the dualistic mindset which is so detrimental to the interior, mystical, and experiential faith. “In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorizing intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate ‘things’ and ‘events’ are realities of nature is an illusion.” — Fritjof Capra
The ultimate reality is unknowable and beyond the scope of human conceptualization. The non-dual state or emptiness ceases to make distinctions, and non-dualistic awareness can see inwardly, subtly, feeling and experiencing and loving with unconditional kindness, truth, wisdom, and compassion. Being, living, experiencing without cognitive borders is pure awareness. It is a radical awareness, an understanding, a transformation of consciousness.
When we listen deeply to our intuition, the internal sense, all is a seamless unity, despite the appearance or teachings to the contrary or the commonly held assumptions and mindset that we live in a dualistic creation. The challenge is to give pure awareness to the present moment, to personal, interior experience, to the ‘simple’ presence of the now, the only place where we can be in the truth, immersed in and infused with discovering how to be fully alive. The negative way opens a path to non-duality. “Immeasurably exalted is His Essence above the descriptions of His creatures… Far be it from His glory that human pen or tongue should hint at His mystery, or that human heart conceives His Essence” (Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet to Hashim. GWB XCIV:192) Importantly, meditation practices cut through even the most subtle clinging to concepts, including all clinging to religious ideas, beliefs, practices, and spiritual experiences as if they were ultimate. This clinging to a religious tradition as if it were an ultimate occurs if religious training does not provide the means to uproot fully the subconscious tendencies of conditioned grasping to human conceptualizations that obscure the unconditioned and nonconceptual Awakening or emptiness.
An innate, pure, non-dual awareness uniting the wisdom of beyond grasping to dualism with compassion for all still caught in such grasping is conveyed by Buddhism through its teachings and practices. The fruit of this path is the actualization of Emptiness: non-dual, non-conceptual awareness, tranquility, equanimity, all- inclusive compassion with activity on behalf of all alienated beings.
The Buddha saw in the wisdom of non-conceptual, non-dual awareness, a path that is capable of non-attachment to even the subtlest attachments. For Kitaro Nishida, perhaps the most significant and influential Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century, pure experience is: ‘To experience is to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrications. What we usually refer to as experience is adulterated with some sort of thought, so by pure I am referring to the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination. …Pure experience is identical to direct experience. When one directly experiences one’s own state of consciousness, there is not yet a subject or an object, and knowing and its object are completely unified. This is the most refined type of experience.’
Mental training in Buddhism and apophatic theology is based on an empirical perspective; that experience is the ultimate criterion of truth. With the penetrative insight of Awakening, the Arahant, meaning worthy or noble person who has attained enlightenment because of listening to and practicing the teachings of a Buddha, sees through the commonly proposed ultimate validity of concepts. For the Arahant, all concepts are transparent and are not grasped dogmatically. They are not regarded as ultimate categories, concepts are “merely worldly conventions in common use, which an Arahant makes use of, without clinging to them.” (D. N. I. 202) One’s entire conceptual blueprint must be released—though gradually—and in the final awareness, even those concepts that have given us the greatest help in our spiritual practice are given up.
The Buddha used the raft simile to illustrate this; “In the same way, monks, I have taught the Dhamma compared to a raft, for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of holding onto. Understanding the Dhamma as taught compared to a raft, you should let go even of Dhammas, to say nothing of non-Dhammas.” (Sutta-pitakaMajjhimaNikaya 22) The common human condition is to be attached to the cravings of egotistical consciousness, and yet this dualistic consciousness deludes us of the awareness of the flow of reality. The Cataphatic religions provide languages, symbols, and practices that alert us to the compelling deceptiveness of egotistical consciousness with its illusory character of separation and relativity of pain and pleasure. However, it has been a tragedy of religion, that while pointing toward an Awakening from dualistic dogma, it entangles its practitioners in a dualistic consciousness which experiences the ego/self as Soul.
Indeed, this common version of moral and metaphysical duality undermines and confuses any capacities for trueself-kindness, humility, compassion, and Awakening. In many religions, there is an implicit non-duality in the often promoted imagery of love. It uses a vocabulary that expresses the intuitive primacy of love, peace, and compassion accompanying the non-dual, non-conceptual awareness. However, any commandment to love will remain encumbered by one’s own egotistical will. Marguerite Porete was someone who understood that clinging to religious ideas, beliefs, practices, and spiritual experiences did indeed serve as an impediment to the annihilation of the final obstacle of a permanency idea. As Marguerite Porete said, “One who remains in will is often in such a war, whatever good works his will might do.’ Through the disciplines of asceticism, there is a lifestyle that reduces material aspects of life to a minimum and to a high degree of simplicity. This can include simple clothing, sleeping without a bed or in nature, and eating a minimal amount of food. Then there are the harsher practices that involve body mortification, torturing one’s body, and self-infliction of pain.
The will is remorselessly dominated to renounce its attachments, but the will often resist and is strengthened by those techniques because of the maintenance of the dualistic foundation of subject/object, and egocentric structures of the mind remain intact. However, just as the the truth about divinity is not apprehended by more accurate conceptualizations, the release of the will is not accomplished by painful joys and sorrows but, instead, by letting it go with attaining pure awareness or nothingness.
As Rumi wrote, ‘Your worst enemy is hiding within yourself, and that enemy is your nafs or false ego.’ In a mystical way, Rumi is effectively instructing us of the need of purifying our consciousness from the falseness and dualities that are embedded in the sense-based life. Therefore, Nafs or False Ego(نفس (equals any egotistical inclination. The last hindrance of achieving awakening for the Buddha was understanding impermanence and co-dependent arising and then letting go of craving and attachment to everything leaving pure awareness and No-thing.
Mistaking Words for the Truth In the pre-enlightened mind, language is intimately linked with not only the dualistic subject/object illusion but also with the objectivist concept of a chasm between symbol-system realism and truth. there is a fallacy of the use of language as a descriptor of an objective, static ‘world’ experience. Words, and all concepts, are mental constructions of the internal and external world. They are abstractions, not the objective reality they try to capture. As Rudolf Carnap stated, ‘[…] The formulation in terms of “comparison”, in speaking of “facts” or “realities”, easily tempts one into the absolutistic view according to which we are said to search for an absolute reality whose nature is assumed as fixed independently of the language chosen for its description. The answer to a question concerning reality however depends not only upon that “reality” or upon the facts, but also upon the structure (and the set of concepts) of the language used for the description.’ In Buddhism and apophatic theology, a language is a tool for communication and for pointing to the truth, a means to help us attain Awakening and Nothingness. However, to mistake words for the truth is almost as ridiculous as mistaking a finger pointing to the moon for the moon itself!
Buddhists show empathy not only to other people but also to nonhuman creatures. Because the Buddha’s teachings move us away from an egotistical, anthropomorphic, and self-centered worldview, it only makes sense that we should come to see the other creatures with whom we share the earth as having as rightful a place as do human beings. In Buddhist teachings, nonhuman creatures are not lesser or ‘other.’ Thich Nhat Hanh writes: ‘A human being is an animal, a part of nature. But we single ourselves out from the rest of nature. We classify other animals and living beings as nature as if we ourselves are not part of it. Then we pose the question, “How should I deal with Nature?” We should deal with nature the way we deal with ourselves. . .! Harming nature is harming ourselves, and vice-versa.’
We are all Interconnected even with the Universe 