It is obvious that a church imbued with a paradigm of domination and subordination takes issue with Eckhartian thought. As a patriarchy arrogating a presumption of ‗speaking for God‘, such a church also takes issue with aspects of Traherne and Julian. Within their texts, all three writers find it challenging to pick and choose between what might be of God and what might be of humanity. On my readings, they venture a sub-text, and sometimes an explicit text, of the non-duality of being. There is a degree of concurrence. They do not regard the Ultimate or the One as ‗another‘ in the sense of absolutely ‗other‘.320
Taken as a whole, the passages quoted in 319
this study amount to careful declarations of mystical union. But the language of ‗the One‘ and of ‗Oneness‘ is fraught: it is forever vulnerable to misuse, not to mention over-simplification. Although I see consonance (and although Ramana‘s perspective is fundamental to my poetry) it cannot be assumed that ‗the One‘ means the same thing across the traditions.321
One Fruit
Come outside to my apricot tree, where galahs have left but one fruit.
Let me have pleasure in your pleasure in its taste.
You have watched bees load their legs with rosemary pollen;
you have seen spinebills eat the bees.
320
And they regard their neighbours as neither ‗other‘ nor ‗the same‘.
321
In classical Hinduism, for example, the One is generally held to be indefinable and ‗attributeless‘. It is not necessarily to be conflated with any theistic expression. But, whatever the gradings of conceptual thought, it is regrettable that in both Vedāntin and Christian life, the experience of I Am quickly became subsumed by moralism, ritual and abstract formulae. Intuition and spontaneity, it seems, are doomed to be taken over by namarupa (‗name and form‘). The signs and symbols, and their elaborations, were intended merely as pointers to that which is beyond name and form. In effect, Eckhart and to a lesser extent Traherne and Julian, aspired to peel away the onion of truth (satyam) to which ‗name and form‘ point.
Sensory impressions, fragments of information, deductions which might feed an intuition.
To be alive,
to be here this moment. Loved in the nearness; drawn to an otherness.
Poetry is not about delivering messages; nonetheless, excellent writing which happens to carry a message can find wide acceptance.322 The poem above derives from mutual pleasuring; it is meant to hint at my disquiet with ‗individualism‘. Does contemporary society push people in the direction of excessive individualism? Does it do so under the lure of self-fulfilment? If this is true, one of the consequences might be that values which transcend the individual will be shut out.
No commentator has, in my view, chronicled the ‗Western‘ demise of ‗spiritual non-duality‘ more persuasively than Charles Taylor323. Taylor traces the emergence of a self-identifying ‗self‘ it to the Enlightenment. The gradual breakdown of social hierarchies and the rise of a sense of egalitarian dignity were two main factors. An ideal of inner authenticity arose, so that gradually a personal identification which was socially-derived came to be considered as feudal. Taylor argues that the authentic self does not fully emerge from one‘s inner depths, but is
322
I am thinking, for example, of novels and essays by Marilynne Robinson (b.1943).
‗coaxed out‘ by other people who are felt to be significant. Self-knowledge, therefore, depends upon the dialogical recognition of others with whom one shares language and hence understandings.324
Taylor implies that the greater the dialogical recognition, the greater the individual‘s transformation. A person‘s self-images become more positive; they implicitly invoke the truer self as a regulative ideal.325 When earlier indefiniteness or lack of authenticity is transcended, communion can be experienced. In a later book Taylor laments that ‗the culture of authenticity‘ has sunk from a defensible ideal to the level of an axiom. Few people, he states, can now bring themselves to argue the case for moral positions which might support authenticity.
By this I mean the view that moral positions are not in any way grounded in reason or in the nature of things but are ultimately just adopted by each of us because we find ourselves drawn to them. On this view, reason can‘t adjudicate moral disputes.326
Reason has trouble in adjudicating disputes because of the predominance of moral subjectivism, which Taylor rejects. He continues as follows.
The general force of subjectivism in our philosophical world and the power of neutral liberalism intensify the sense that these issues can‘t and shouldn‘t be talked about. And then on top of it all, social science seems to be telling us that to understand such phenomena as the contemporary culture of authenticity, 324 ibid., p.31f. 325 ibid., p.43. 326
we shouldn‘t have recourse in our explanations to such things as moral ideals but should see it all in terms of, say, recent changes in the mode of production, or new patterns of youth consumption, or the security of affluence.327
A self-described Christian humanist, Taylor holds that ‗spirit‘ is an irreducible component of human nature. We define ourselves in terms of a vision of what is pre-eminent to us. Ontologically, such self-definition is unavoidable: we need to articulate that which moves us. This is especially true in relation to the values by which we aspire to live. These will constitute our ultimate ‗goods‘, our pre-eminent vision. Layers of modern assumptions might need to be worked through, in order for us to bring these ‗goods‘ to full consciousness. Taylor notes that ‗feeling‘ ought to be defended as inherent to the spiritual component of humanity. ‗Feeling‘ has irreducible epistemological value. It is closely linked to our views on the nature of reality; it is integral to what we regard as all-important. Unusually, Taylor links a sense of ‗who we are‘ with the process of becoming ‗oriented in moral space‘.328
He rejects naturalistic accounts of moral development. Instead, he holds the view that we are necessarily oriented with some sort of moral framework. We acquire ‗languages of moral and spiritual discernment‘329 by means of which we are empowered to discern between our experiences and to make distinctions which constitute acts of understanding. Taylor uses the words ‗epistemic gain‘330
to describe our movement, from diverse backgrounds and feelings and intuitions, towards
327
ibid., p.21.
328
Sources of the Self, op.cit., p.28.
329
ibid., p.35.
varied patterns of ‗qualitative discriminations‘.331
We move towards new ways of seeing, which become the acts of understanding whereby we arrive at a sense of who we are.
In the Gospel stories, however, something beyond Taylor‘s ‗epistemic gain‘ is being taught. The disciple who goes out to ‗find‘ her true self will find only that which she already is. Jesus has a direct interest in lived experience and in finding the right words to depict the underlying meanings of experience. He is not represented as being overly concerned with general abstractions. The theological construction of his parables tends to reveal an absorption with actual perichoretic situations, with what William James called ‗primary realities‘, and not with doctrines. Hence the reported emphasis in the Gospels on discovering that which we already are. Appropriating from India the language of ‗the Self‘, it might be said that transcendence of the false or delusory self results in the eternal Self‘s disclosure.332 But I need to be careful, in the pursuit of parallels or congruencies, not to elide words and concepts. Different religious languages are involved. And not only languages per se. We are also dealing with attempts to give names to aspects of reality which are ‗different‘. In view of this, John B. Cobb proposes ‗complementary pluralism‘. His premise is that ‗… the totality of what is, is very complex, far exceeding all that we can ever hope to know or think‘.333
Cobb suggests that complementary pluralism might adopt three kinds of ‗ultimates‘. These are, first, the ‗formless‘ or ‗acosmic‘,
331ibid., p.77. 332
But although the eternal Self has a share in transcendence, it is not necessarily (within its own tradition) equated with ‗the All and the One‘. Nor is this Self always equated with pure consciousness, although perhaps it might be regarded as ‗root- consciousness‘, of which consciousness is a reflection. Can it be said that Eckhart‘s ‗our true nature‘ precisely parallels the Self of the Upanishads? There are different conceptual systems here; even so, in both systems the ‗primordial true nature‘ (in Hinduism, the Ātmā or the Self) becomes evident when a person develops (or reverts to) a transmuted consciousness.
333
Cobb, J.B., Transforming Christianity and theWorld, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 1999, p.135. (I might add, at this point, that pluralism is sometimes erroneously confused with the effeteness of cultural or moral relativism.)
such as Eckhart‘s ‗Godhead beyond God‘ and Advaita Vedānta. Second, the theistic or ‗formed‘, such as Yahweh and Christ. Third, the ‗cosmic‘, such as primal religions and so- called ‗Native‘ traditions.334
This proposal from Cobb seems to provide a circumspect means of honouring the irreducible plurality of the voices of truth.