Mystery and Metaphysics

Sometimes its important to be reminded that our individual and particularized experience of life here in space-time is but a tiny sliver of the total experience of Transcendence which lies at the core of our deepest existence. By that I mean, our present awareness, though real in its own way, is a dimmed light of consciousness. The Fullness of Consciousness can hardly be spoken, but to remind us, there are the works of the great metaphysicians of Spirit, among them Meister Eckhart in Christianity, Ibn al-‘Arabi in Islam, and Shankara in Hinduism. A contemporary writer, Reza Shah-Kazemi has written a text comparing these three thinkers called Paths to Transcendence. In it he writes to remind us of the Transcendent ground of our being in words that are hard to grasp, but “true food” nonetheless. Here is a sampling:

To say “transcendence” is to say “union”; a union in which consciousness persists, but in a mode which nullifies the individual condition. If consciousness itself were nullified, then the mystics would not be able to assert that duality was in fact transcended; and if the individual condition is not nullified, the claim to have attained the degree of absolute transcendence is undermined.

According to Eckhart: if there is to be a true union, one of the two agents so unified must lose its “whole identity and being”—failing which there will be “united-ness” but not union; this crucial point must be seen in connection with the claim … that he “breaks through” in his “return” to the Essence, for it is there—and there only—that … the “whole identity and being” of Eckhart as individual is lost, and what is found is transcendent identity and being in and as the Godhead: the identity attained is so completely one that Eckhart is able to claim, again most elliptically, that he “begets his begetter.” (205).

This language is just at the edge of “thought,” but it represents something of Yeshua’s own words that “I and the Father are One,” and anyone who follows him, Yeshua says, must, in the end, “lose” him or herself. Yeshua was also speaking “on the edge of language.”