Tag Archives: Eckhart Tolle

Apophasis

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It occurs to me that the dilemma I wrote of in my last post, that of being unable to find words for spiritual realities outside of one or another religious tradition, is similar to one faced by theologians and philosphers since classical times, which led to the development of apophatic theology, the discipline which attempts to speak not of God, but of what God is not. Words apply to things, and God – at least God as understood as the ground of being itself – is no thing.

Undifferentiated being, the ground and source of all that is, cannot have attributes – accidents, to use the theological term – that can be described. Being as it is the source of all, and the foundation of awareness itself, it cannot rightly be the object of any sentence. We can assign to it a term, Being (with a capital B) perhaps, as Eckhart Tolle prefers, or God; but all that does is function as maybe a placeholder for a name. That is about all it can do.

We can, of course, speak and think and write of practice; we can think, and write, critically of others’ thoughts and writings. To try to do this without unduly borrowing from avowedly Christian – or Buddhist, or Taoist, or whatever – terminology is certainly a good thing; but what is really essential is to try and avoid doing it with the phenomenology of the contemplative life itself. We must somehow find a way to speak only of the inwardness of the way, without attempting to explain or justify it. Writers like Tolle himself, or Nisargadatta Maharaj, often seem to get it right; whereas ones like Sam Harris or Chris Niebauer, with their heavy borrowing from Buddhist teachings, sometimes do not.

Perhaps my problem in all this comes down to diffidence, as much as anything. To endeavour to write truly about the spiritual life, and the reason for the spiritual life, without borrowing from the lexicon of one religion or another, requires a kind of self confidence I have always found difficult to acquire. Maybe it does come down to too much willingness to think, after all.

The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am.” He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being “at one” and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested — at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

What’s in a name?

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Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?

The word Being explains nothing, but nor does God. Being, however, has the advantage that it is an open concept. It does not reduce the infinite invisible to a finite entity. It is impossible to form a mental image of it. Nobody can claim exclusive possession of Being. It is your very essence, and it is immediately accessible to you as the feeling of your own presence, the realization I am that is prior to I am this or I am that. So it is only a small step from the word Being to the experience of Being.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

We humans still have much of our tribal ancestry hanging around: we tend to feel lost and unsafe unless we can identify as part of something larger than ourselves. When I was a teenager it might be whether you were a mod or a rocker; some identify strongly with others of their own race; very often it is a religious identification, sometimes zoomed-in to which actual congregation or meeting one belongs to, or which particular doctrinal flavour one adheres to.

These affiliations are tremendously sticky, in terms of social psychology, which perhaps explains in part why people find it so difficult to distance themselves from cults, however pernicious. They don’t only consist in feeling warm fuzzies for those just like us; they all too often involve feeling anything but warm fuzziness for those who are different – “othering” them. They provide us with a secure identity, with protection against those suspicious others, with a home and a community.

All such communities have badges. They may be visual (as with the mods and rockers) or audible (shibboleths); they may be emotional or conceptual, but they work. (Even those whose practice is dedicated to the realisation of the illusory nature of the self can unthinkingly fall into tribal identification – the vipassana lot, or the Pure Land ones, Sōtō Zen or Rinzai.) Tragically, these identifications can even be projected onto a deity or a metaphysical conceit, and then we really are in trouble: “My God is the only true God; yours is a heretical invention!”

Words are sometimes at the very heart of these identifications, and we don’t realise it. I recall a conversation over lunch with a friend some months ago, where I was trying to explain why I wasn’t comfortable any longer using the word “God”. I said that for me the word gave entirely the wrong impression if used of the metaphysical ground. “God” implied for me a being, so that one could say, “Look – there’s God, over there at the table by the door!” But she is a Catholic; of course she uses “God” to define a finite entity, even if the Catechism of the Catholic Church says he is a mystery (CCC 230).

Eckhart Tolle uses the word Being to speak of the metaphysical ground, just as Meister Eckhart used Istigkeit, or Paul Tillich “Ground of Being”. Some avoid using any term to refer to the ground: things exist, they say, what more do we need? But at the end of it all, is isness. I have to call it something, even if it is ineffable.

Am I trying to avoid identification altogether? Why? I admit that since childhood I’ve never been all that comfortable with being a part of something, especially a something, like a religion or a political party, that requires right attitudes, right speaking, right thinking as well as right (moral) action. However close I feel to so much Buddhist teaching, and no matter how immense the gratitude and respect I feel for so many Buddhist teachers, I am not a Buddhist. The same applies to Taoism, contemplative Christianity, or any other community of practice. After all these years perhaps I am just happier out on the borderlines, in the saltmarshes of the spirit.

No thing at all

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Over the last few months I have written little. If I am honest, I should have to say that this has not been because I have had nothing to say, so much as that I had run out of words.

Over the long years of my Christian contemplative practice – from the age of thirty, maybe – I was able to draw on the deep well of Christian iconography, theology, the Bible itself, for words and images to tell myself about the journey I was on; words which I could readily share. Since then it has been more difficult, much more difficult. I am not a Buddhist. Despite my great respect for Buddhism’s 2,500 years of spiritual and psychological research and development, and my love for many Buddhist writers classical and contemporary, their words do not on the whole “do it for me” in the way that the Christian tradition so often has.

Nonetheless, despite a couple of abortive attempts to return to formal, organised religion, and despite nearly a year of trying to live out a kind of “churchless Christianity”, I could not with any intellectual honesty understand myself as a member of a Christian church any longer. The faith that is indistinguishable from community, from the gathered people (ekklēsia) that is the church, simply no longer functioned as a descriptor for where I found myself.

Increasingly, despite (or because of) my subsequent unwavering practice of broadly vipassana-based meditation, or a version of centering prayer, I felt lost, my heart clogged with the dust of broken words, dry and hollowed out. I had no idea who I was any more.

It came to the point where all I could do was cry out (to whom?) in the cold hours before dawn, that I was lost, so lost. No maps I knew showed this desert place, wherever it was, and besides, my compass no longer worked. In this condition, tired out, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, light poured through the window across the bed. I was light myself, empty and crystal clear. No, I was not. I, was not; except that there was a gossamer memory that knew itself as me, someone who had, effectively, died in the night. “All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost.” (Andreas Müller)

That phrase, no thing, was all that was left of language that morning. (It is a phrase that has been with me, resonant and entirely resistant to explanation, for many years.) I cannot possibly describe the freedom, the irresistible joy that was left where I had been.

Since, the joy and the freedom have not dimmed. The gossamer memory of me still seems to function perfectly well as a way to get around in the phenomenal world, but it is no longer convincing. It is as transparent as glass. I so love all that is, even if it is no thing. Especially as it is no thing.

What happened? I don’t know. Of course I don’t. What happened is not the kind of thing “I” could know. This seems like a clever answer, a smarty-pants way to get one up on my readers, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. I can say, though, that it is not “something” that “I” achieved. Müller again: “What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.”

So is this the fruit of meditation? The culmination of some kind of a process? Obviously not. And yet. Could it have happened without a couple of years’ steady practice of meditation, following nearly forty of Christian contemplation? Yes, obviously. People like Eckhart Tolle and Ramana Maharshi each had their illumination following moments of great stress or despair, not unlike, according to their own descriptions, the desert place where I had found myself that night. They do not seem to have spent long years meditating in preparation. Ramana hadn’t had time, anyway; he was only sixteen.

But perhaps, for me at least, practice made a place where it was possible. It just happened, that much is clear. For me, it seems to have happened while I was dreamlessly asleep. But maybe practice functioned like cultivating a field. Cultivation doesn’t make anything grow – you need seeds, and water, and warmth for that – but it does make a place where seeds can safely germinate. I don’t know. Something had to get me out there into that desert – something had to shear away the props that upheld the idea of a me who could get somewhere, even into a desert.

There is certainly nothing I could have done to force such a thing to happen (and from the point of view of “I” that would have felt not unlike some sort of suicide) and it doesn’t happen to or for “me” anyhow. It happens. What is beyond is no thing at all.