‘There are two urges in life. One is towards selfhood, individualization, and separation; the other towards an escape from the loneliness of self into something bigger than self. [Human beings are] the most individualized of all [animals], and yet, at the same time, the ones most capable, through thought and imagination, of participating in everything’.[i]
A monk from Mt Athos in Greece once said, ‘We have died and we are in love with everything’.
‘What is meant by a sense of union, of reconnection, is best understood by contrasting it with our ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness is marked by a sense of separation, a distinction between the self and the rest of reality, commonly called the self-world distinction. This awareness emerges early in our lives in the birth of self-awareness, the sense of being a separate self. In this ordinary everyday consciousness, we experience ourselves as “in here” and the world as “out there”. It is the world of the subject-object distinction, so common that it is built into our grammar; I (subject) see you (object). It is the world of the boundaried self, the separate self. In mystical experience, this sense of separation is replaced by a sense of connection with “what is”.’[ii]
Einstein argued, the sense of being separate from everything else is an illusion of our self-consciousness; a very useful illusion, fiction if you will, that enables our living in our world of means and ends. But is this sense of a separate self a genuine picture of reality, or is it something that has evolved in order to live in a world where I really do need MY food and MY drink in order to survive? The development of self conscious separate self is without loss. The separate self is ultimately lonely and disconnected, and this dis-connection from everything else might lead to a lack for everything else, it’s not you, so why should it matter? Moreover this living in a separate self privileges a particular way of knowing because this way of knowing happens to be useful to us. So privileged has this way of knowing become, that it seems to many to be the only way of knowing. At one level that’s entirely correct.
In the ordinary everyday world of means, my knowledge consists of me, the subject, knowing about a set of objects that are not me. In order to know anything I must maintain the subjective me. Without the subject there is no objects to know, everything is just one. This knowledge depends on the subject-object divide; the self-world distinction. However, the ultimate knowledge, knowledge of the totality of things, can only exist when the subject and object, self and world, and the distinction between them is dissolved. The problem is that without the self, and I would argue that includes the collective self of humanity, there is no knowing in the ordinary sense of the word. When it comes to knowledge of the totality, and indeed any kind of being such as God that might transcend the totality, we must recognise the impossibility of knowing and must embrace a form of agnosticism, of not-knowing or of unknowing.
To know God, then, is the reverse of all our ordinary ideas about knowing. Ordinary knowing is of subjects knowing objects. To know God is to not know God since God is not and cannot be a object, it is the only way of knowing God. As Thomas Merton put it:
“It is not ‘consciousness of’ but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such ‘disappears’”.[iii]
And Meister Eckhart:
‘The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love’.
If all that seems like soggy mysticism with no practical value, then the clue is in the final word, ‘love’. Which brings me bring me back to Einstein who wrote:
‘A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security’. [iv]
[i] F.C. Happold, Mysticism, 40.
[ii] Marcus Borg, Jesus, 132.
[iii] Thomas Merton, Zen and Birds of Appetite, 24.
[iv] Condolence letter to Norman Salit, (4 March 1950); also quoted in “The Einstein Papers. A Man of Many Parts” in The New York Times (29 March 1972), 1.
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