Quo vadis, Pinoy?

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

A decade has passed since we last observed the centennial celebration of our hard-won freedom after more than three centuries of colonial domination by Spain. One may well recall with what pomp and pageantry we all celebrated the occasion and poured down the streets in Metro Manila and in the other parts of the archipelago, proclaiming to the world and high heavens our independence and self-rule.

Filipinos prize their freedom, knowing pretty well how dearly it was paid for by the blood of our brave and noble heroes, both sung and unsung, so that the succeeding generations may live in peace, which is the precondition for progress. And if we sang with the purest voice to celebrate our freedom, it is because we have known the depths of black despair and travail in the iron hands of Castilian hegemony, including the American and Japanese brands.

Vigilance remains ever as the price exacted to preserve liberty. Kasarinlan at kalayaan hinding-hindi pababayaan… so goes the Centennial theme song. That vow should be renewed in the heart of every Filipino, reaffirmed in the marrow of his bones and rewritten in his own blood like the Katipuneros did. While keeping watch over those forces that would subvert his political freedom, he should stand up to the challenge of its prime concomitant, and that is, responsibility.

Without the will to assume responsibility as the requirement of freedom, we can easily forfeit it, as we once did in recent Philippine history, under a despot; or turn it over to totalitarian ideologues who deceptively use the very rhetoric of democracy. Unable to bear the weight of responsibility of self-governance, we may give up our freedom by default and unwarily let the power freaks run the show for ourselves. Then we would see the scenario of the slave learning to love his chain. We should be warned against the mentality that would settle for just about anything less only because the bigger deal entails stiffer demands.

This brings us to the question: Where do we stand now and whither are we headed? Can we truly say that we live at present in peace and prosperity as a nation?

Let us zero in on peace since it is the more primordial issue. Do we really want it deep in our hearts? There has been much talk about peace ad nauseam. The common folks in the street babble about peace, peace negotiators peddle peace, and clergymen at the pulpit prattle about peace.

Yet there is no peace.

What could possibly be the reason why? Here’s what.

The crisis is in our consciousness. Unless we effect a radical change in our ways of thinking, a complete turnaround in the structure of our consciousness, individually and as a nation, there is no hope for peace.

Nothing short of a revolution of the heart is needed. Yes, we begin with ourselves, brother. On a personal level. Gandhi put it perfectly when he said that the individual must be the change he would want to see in the world. For we cannot change the world. Do not believe Karl Marx who said that our task is not to understand the world but to change it. That is baloney. But we can change as an individual. While we cannot remove all the muck or stones on the ground that bruise our feet, we can make good shoes to walk over them. Our difficulty, it seems to me, is that in our tradition there is no culture of inwardness. We have long been used to perceiving that which is “out there” while neglecting to look inwardly at what is “in here” under the skin as it were.

Thus, we are all held hostage by what we see with our physical eyes. We hardly listen to the promptings of the voice of the silence within. We value externals more than the internal, the superficial rather than the essential. Hence, we love to display our possessions, our bank accounts, cars, etc. but give little or no appreciation for such inner qualities as goodness, compassion, charity, honesty, justice, gratitude, prudence, integrity, and so on. We fail to understand that the inner is as important, if not more so, as the outer; and together they make up two facets of a unitary movement. As within, so without.

It follows, then, that the outside turmoil that plagues us in our country today is the external expression of the hidden chaos in the individual Filipino. Our society goes awry as the individual’s psyche becomes a seething cauldron of negative emotions and murderous thoughts. The individual is not separate from society. He is society, multiplied umpteen times. Psychologically, he is no different than everybody else—phoney, self-centered, violent, and driven by the three p’s: position, power, and prestige.

The Filipino who has long been hounded by the Furies will discover that peace as a distant ideal is really at his fingertips by creating a space in his mind so that he is no longer torn by inner conflicts. Purged of the debris that muddles his mind and heart, he attains inward wholeness that makes for psychological freedom, the inner counterpart of political freedom. Then only will he prove himself worthy of the heritage of political liberty that his illustrious forefathers had secured for him by laying down their lives. Equipped with the wisdom of the heart, he sets forth upon the path of righteousness as he pursues his dream of a brighter tomorrow.

Humanity is asleep

Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

An intriguing idea from esoteric literature may help us understand ourselves and the hype and hoopla about the current political controversies involving the national leadership, legislators and all, aptly described as a circus of sorts in which the performers are no more than clowns, tricksters, or plain wheeler-dealers out to push for their own vested interest. This notion in question is deceptively commonplace or even trite but contains a wealth of profound insight. It holds that man is asleep and that his greatest and most important task is to wake up.

Nothing new nor spectacular nor world-shaking there, really. That is even something everybody takes for granted as a given. You might also contend aren’t we already awake every time we get up in the morning. But that statement should be read literally as it is not intended as a metaphor. To maintain that man is in a state of sleep means that he is not in full control of himself, his faculties or his actions. If this is the case, then he acts as if under hypnosis, or like a machine without a will of his own, without nerves or feelings; and his responses are programmed like those of automatons run by artificial intelligence.

When a murderer hacks to death his helpless victim, when a classroom teacher sexually harasses his student, when a father violates his own daughter, or when a suicide bomber detonates his explosives to kill his imagined foes, including himself — all of them are controlled by their fury or lust or delusion or twisted thinking. In other words, they overstep the line even though they move and act while in their ordinary waking consciousness. They are not really in full possession of their rational or moral nature and have degenerated to the level of the beast. These people are ruled by their baser, instinctual or irrational impulses. In short, they are sleepwalkers.

To explain their outrageous behavior, these unfortunate souls will say after the fact: “I was beside myself with jealousy and rage.” Or “But I forgot myself.” Or “My eyesight dimmed, I had a mental blackout.” Or “I did not know what I was doing then and there.” Or “Something or somebody had taken hold of me and made me do the thing.”

So far, our examples hold water, I suppose. How about the unscrupulous politicians and scheming businessmen who amass big fortunes by stealing hundreds of millions from the people’s coffers in the form of kickbacks, ghost projects, bloated budgets or shady negotiated contracts and whose only capital is their political clout, pull and uncanny ability in making glib sales talk? How about the economic saboteurs like the tax-evaders, smugglers, cutthroat monopolists, or organizers of political and business cartels, etc.? Don’t they utilize their rational faculty as cunning schemers? Can they be called somnambulists, too?

A crafty villain becomes no less a villain for using his reason. Iago, the blackest villain in all literature, was in full command of his reason while executing his evil designs against his victim Othello. A backstabber can even make you believe he is your friend. Worse yet, this breed of wicked creatures is under the impression that they are doing good while perpetrating their treachery! Generally, they are gloatingly unrepentant and unregenerate, being made to feel comfortable by their self-serving rationalizations. After all, they would say—if you have read the Gospel of Judas—even a traitor like Judas himself had an important role to play in the overall scheme of redemption.

So, what is really involved in the fact that man is asleep? He is operating from the lower levels of his consciousness. His actions are governed by the darker side of his makeup and he does not listen to the inner voice—call it conscience, moral sense, soul, Atman, or what you will—that emanates from his deepest essence as a human being. It is this silent censor within that tells him whether or not he is going out of bounds. The trouble is that many of us no longer believe in the existence of the soul. We do not think there is such a thing as Budhi, as in the expression: “Wala kang budhi!” People will smile at you once you drop words like “Spirit,” “God,” and the like, thanks to the ascendancy of secular humanism, scientism, and crass materialism.

One common form of being asleep is blindness, i.e., the inability to take notice of things like discerning the real from the unreal, and the good from the evil. Many times Jesus rebuked his disciples for not seeing what is right in front of their eyes. In the Gospel of Thomas, they asked him when the new world will come. He told them, What you look for has already come but you do not know it. Similarly, asked when the kingdom will come, he said to them, The Kingdom of the Father is spread out on the earth but people do not see it.

Our predicament, nevertheless, is not hopeless. We can all wake up as we must. Without going now into the rarefied sphere of spirituality and its nitty-gritty, there is a practical way by which we may get around this problem of sleep.

The act of sleeping is characterized by the absence of awareness. We are lost to the world when we fall asleep. Hence, the process of awakening necessitates what the Buddhists call as mindfulness, that is, the act of paying attention from moment to moment. No sooner are we inattentive than we slip into sleep, into forgetfulness. (Oh what atrocities are committed because of mindlessness, of thoughtlessness!) Just like in driving a car. Once we lose our presence of mind, we instantly court disaster. And how do we know that we are being alert? To be attentive is to know that we are inattentive. It is really that simple. Or that difficult.

All this entails self-observation and constant self-remembering, ever watching ourselves as we go about the business of daily living. What is required is practice. Knowing this idea on a theoretical basis is useless and won’t turn us into a better person. It would amount to acquiring mastery of all the details in a manual on swimming without actually diving right into the pool.

Breaking the cycle of revolutions

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

A revolution begins as a revulsion against what is seen to be an undesirable social order. Change is the battle cry. Enough is enough, goes the refrain. The time is ripe for a better substitute to the despicable status quo. To achieve the charted political agenda the time-honored moral law is reversed. So, the end is made to justify the means. The end is usually grandiose in its conception. The chief means is of course violence.

After all is said and done, why is it that one revolution almost always leads to another and to further violence? The Russian Revolution was followed by the Bolshevik Revolution, the American Revolution by the American Civil War. Even the French Revolution which was inspired by the noble catchwords of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity had in its wake the bloody Reign of Terror. The Philippine Revolution had executions like that of Andres Bonifacio in the hands of a brother Filipino who was a fellow revolutionary.

Could it be that contrary to the tenets of political expediency crafted by Machiavelli there is no such thing as a purely political question apart from the moral one? It was Thoreau who saw that the political and moral problems are interlinked. He wrote: “What is the value of any political freedom except as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves or a freedom to be free?”

At the root of the well-known quarrel between two friends, the French existentialists Sartre and Camus, is the issue of whether or not the course of political action should be guided by a moral compass. The former, who sympathized with Marxism, espoused political expediency anchored upon absolute freedom and the inexorability of dialectical materialism. The latter recognized the necessity for some kind of moral brake to stave off any political power from running out of control like a runaway train. Camus believed in tempering political action with restraint and moderation. He despised any form of absolutism.

Rizal was also aware that the revolutionary, carried away by his equation of violence with freedom, soon sets up his own brand of tyranny. Any political structure set up upon the foundation of brute force may hold its own for a while but it is bound to crumble in the end. For unbridled violence can only beget further violence. Rizal knew this quite ahead of his time. Lord Acton formulated this ethical truth into the now famous maxim: Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A political exercise like an armed conflict should steer clear of getting caught in the net of a new tyranny which but replaces the oppressor’s. How all too easily the underdog becomes in his turn the top dog. This was Rizal’s fear about the slaves of today becoming the tyrants of tomorrow. That is why he put education in the foreground of his political creed of nonviolence. Peace and freedom derive significance only from the inner condition of the mind rid of egotistic motives. Without moral intelligence and civility, they are meaningless.

People expect their political leaders to act impeccably like Cesar’s wife, that is, beyond and above suspicion. This means that the authority to govern derives legitimacy as much from the people’s consent as from one’s integrity and probity. In recent Philippine history, this was shown all too well in EDSA II. As then President Estrada’s shenanigans became widely known to a critical mass of Filipinos, he was considered as a disgrace to the presidency. Precisely because of his unmitigated chicanery, he had lost the moral ascendancy to hold the reins of government.

No less ignominious was Marcos’ so-called “democratic revolution.” Euphemistically billed as the New Society, it turned into a nightmare. He imposed martial law purportedly to stall the anarchy spawned by the communists, calling it a “constitutional” dictatorship. But whichever way one looks at his regime, it was nothing but despotism. It was the same dog with a different collar. His twenty-year rule went down our annals as its darkest chapter. Riding the back of the tiger spelt his downfall.

All too often the revolutionary goes berserk in his fight for freedom and justice. He trips along the way through a misuse of power. Like liquor, power is intoxicating and beclouds the mind of its wielder. So, maturity of political vision is what is imperative. This is acquired as the individual evolves from the egocentric stage through the sociocentric phase and finally to the worldcentric with its global outlook.

Moving from the egocentric predicament is no easy job. To subsume one’s self-interest to the larger interests of the greater number is an uphill climb. Being sociocentric is more than just being civic-minded. It is a disposition to regard every member of the body politic on a human level and make as one’s own everyone’s welfare. The worldcentric consciousness is the apex of the individual’s maturation. It makes human brotherhood universal by virtue of our common humanity.

Thinking about thinking

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

The French are well known for their love of thinking, although they have no monopoly of this. They are prone to quarrel, too, over ideas as the bone of contention. It was Pascal, the French mathematician and religious philosopher, who said that man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but that he is a thinking reed. Voltaire, the laughing philosopher, held that liberty of thought is the life of the soul. Descartes, went even further and ascribed man’s essence to the very fact that he thinks. He asserted: I think, therefore I am (Cogito, ergo sum). It is thus upon the activity of thought that man’s whole existence is anchored.

The American transcendentalists also put a premium on thinking. Thoreau said that what a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather, indicates his fate. Emerson said that living is what a man thinks about all day. He further maintained that thoughts rule the world. Proverbs 23:7 of the Old Testament, KJV, states that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Put another way, man is what he thinks; he becomes that which he thinks. Similarly, the Dhammapada, a Buddhist scripture, declares by way of introduction, thus: We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.

All this is evidently true and we can multiply authoritative statements to support this truth. But we all have learned to take this for granted or else have forgotten it. There is no denying that man’s superiority to the other species in the animal kingdom lies in his ability to think, or to know, and to know that he knows. In fact the scientific name, Homo sapiens, which is appended to him, characterizes him chiefly for his intelligence and wisdom.

Humanity’s evolution has been largely propelled by the unique power to weave ideas. Needless to say, the progress of human culture and civilization as we know them today could not have been possible if not for the force of thought. It enabled us to traverse outer space or dive into the world of the infinitely small. Specifically, such unprecedented achievements like the landing on the moon or the splitting of the atom or the cracking of the code of life (the DNA) are marvelous breakthroughs that can only be achieved by thinking beings.

Consider such a contemporary electronic gadget like the computer. As it evolves across time, the technicians and programmers are bent on making it increasingly powerful in terms of capabilities and speed so that its uses are almost limitless. You can do practically anything even with such a small modern marvel like the laptop—word processing, page design, making calculation, drawing, playing games, listening to music, viewing a movie, instant messaging like chatting, or talking to somebody across the continents in full view and in real time—you name it!

Truly, as Hamlet soliloquized, what a piece of work is a man! We have not even mentioned yet other man-made wonders like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, or such a World Heritage Site like our Banaue Rice Terraces. If the imposing cathedrals in Europe could not take your breath away, I don’t know what can. Your heart of course cannot but be touched by the melodies of Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, or Wagner? Or stirred to tears by the tragedies of Sophocles or Aeschylus? Or amused by the comedies of Aristophanes or Moliere? Or deeply impressed by the thought systems of Plato and Aristotle, Hegel and Kant, Heidegger and Sartre, Shankara and Sri Aurobindo? Or transported on cloud nine with lines from Yeats, Neruda, Rumi, Tagore and Pasternak? All these and more are monuments to man’s genius thanks to his thinking ability.

It is no wonder that then and now schools, colleges and universities are all committed to fostering right thinking as an all-important skill in academic training. All academicians worship at the shrine of the cerebral faculty as a tool in the ascent of man. In the repertoire of competencies, critical thinking is at the top of the list. That is as it should be if we are to carry forward our much vaunted technological advancement and progress which can even overwhelm us now with the knowledge explosion.

For all the paeans accorded to thought, there is nevertheless a downside to it. At first blush this assertion sounds preposterous. To even hint at it goes against the grain. Taking issue on thinking or thought as such is a Herculean effort; and only one who has spent a lifetime delving into its nature and with a consummate desire to make sense of our human problems will undertake such an apparently nonsensical attempt. To begin with, it is not hard to concede that had our thinking not been quite sloppy sometimes, many of our costly human errors could have been avoided.

Here, then, in a cursory way is the gist of the teaching on the limitations of thought and its debit side. Thinking and thought as understood here are more or less the same, but in a finer distinction thinking is taken to mean as the active process while thought denotes the end product. Broadly, however, both may refer to the process of mental activity or even to the faculty of mentation itself.

Thought is the response of memory. It works very much like a PC disk which stores data that is given a filename for later retrieval.

For example, when asked a question, the brain searches the files in its memory for the pertinent data recorded on it. If the information was registered there, it is automatically drawn as the answer. The brain is the storehouse of the individual’s memory—his experiences, knowledge, remembrances, images, feelings, conditionings, his entire background. Evidently, no thinking operation is possible at all without memory.

Now, understanding the distorting factor of memory-based thought in our perception is of supreme importance. We never really doubt that we see the tree out there. But in all likelihood we don’t. Why? Because something stands between us and the tree, which we do not notice, and that is our prior knowledge, our impression of the tree. When we look at the tree it is our image of the tree that screens us from it, that is, from its stark reality. To think of the tree, which entails having a name or image of it, already puts us in the stream of time, in the grip of the past. To suppose that we are seeing the tree just as it is is therefore an illusion.

This is so because there is a time lag between the moment of vision, of actually seeing the tree as it is, and the arising of the thought that we have seen the tree. Thinking or thought is always of the past. Pure seeing, clear perception that is, is timeless, beyond thought, beyond time. The minute we think of the tree as magnificent and name it, we have already lost contact with it. The whole operation is extremely subtle in the same way that we do not notice the opening of a rosebud until a time-lapse photography reveals the whole movement to us. What we must do is learn how to see without the interference of thought, or to look with absolute clarity.

Obviously, thinking in its ordinary functioning is necessary in the practical activities of daily life. Otherwise we cannot drive a car and find our way back home. Nor can we engage in creative pursuits nor conduct laboratory experiments. In this sphere of human endeavours, thought is imperative as we have charted earlier on.

Thought or the thought process, however, can prove to be fatal in the psychological realm.

Individuals, for instance, do not relate to another as a friend, a wife or a husband in a real way. There is self-deception involved albeit unnoticed. In fact it is the impression, whether positive or negative, that one has of the person which separates him or her from the other. So, no true contact or communion of the actual persons concerned exists as it becomes an affair of images or between images. When I keep on regarding you as a renegade because of a previous betrayal of trust, I do you wrong because deep within you have already undergone a sea change of character. So, I should not look at you with the eyes of the past, with the burden of the past. I should meet you now, in the present fact of your renewal.

Hence, to understand the origin and structure of thought being rooted in memory as time requires our utmost attention and observation. It is the awareness of the operation of the entire thought process that contains the seed of our liberation from its clutches. Thought is always old and never free, contrary to Voltaire’s pronouncement. The expression “liberty or freedom of thought” is thus a contradiction in terms.

The great modern sage Krishnamurti, who for more than sixty years expounded on this matter, put it pointedly: “To live with thought is like living in a room with a snake.” Thought is that dangerous snake. It is awareness or being totally watchful of its movement, of its whole activity that holds the key to the door to freedom. 

The logic of emptiness

By Dr. Lucio F. Teoxon Jr.

IS IT POSSIBLE to speak of “nothing” as “something” though not a particular thing? This proposition is blatantly a preposterous contradiction in terms. If by “possible” is meant a logical possibility, and if by “to speak” is meant “to equate or assert as identical in meaning” such that: There is an X ≡ There is non-X, or conversely, There is non-X ≡ There is an X, then it simply does not make sense. To further maintain that the “X” which is “non-X” or that the “non-X” which is an “X” is not one single thing in particular amounts to confusion worse confounded.

When Lucretius held that nothing can be created ex nihilo; or when after a long meditation Marcus Aurelius came up with the assertion that nothing can come out of nothing any more than a thing can go back to nothing; or when Shakespeare wrote of an “airy nothing without a habitation and a name,” they were all of one mind as to what the word signifies, i.e., the conception of nothing not different from its standard dictionary meaning as a metaphysical entity or rather nonentity opposed to and devoid of being. Thus, the established signification of nothing is non-existence, non-being, vacuity, nullity. And in the context of this standard usage of the term, the question posed at the outset will no doubt be answered with a resounding "NO!"

There is a sense, however, in which one can talk of nothing as something, if not in fact everything (“non-X” ≡ “X”, or "non-X ≡ All"), such that the concept of nothing (nonbeing or what is not) and the concept of something (being or what is) cease to be mutually exclusive or contradictory. This will necessitate a complete transposition of the conventionally accepted meaning of the term "nothing"; and what is more, entail a complete turnaround in the mind—a radical change of perspective.

If, as Einstein has shown, all measurement is relative to the frame of reference in which measurement is being made¹ so that ultimately it makes no difference to assert that the sun goes around the earth (Ptolemy's geocentric theory) or the latter round the former (Copernicus' heliocentric theory); or if the numerical value of digits depends upon the base and the place value assigned to them in a number system such that it is as much valid to say that four plus four makes ten (where ten stands for eight) as to say four and four equals eight in a base ten numeration, then it is equally legitimate to posit the existence of a dimension of meaning in which our apparently contradictory proposition (There is an X ≡ There is non-X) would be rationally resolved even if only the tools of dualistic logic are employed, that is, without having recourse to the higher logic of the infinite as expounded by P. D. Ouspensky in Tertium Organum.²

One might jestingly suggest that a little wordplay will do the trick here. But there is nothing trickish nor arbitrary nor new about the convention in which a non-standard use of the word “nothing” exists. True enough, it is a world that is not readily accessible to the common run of human beings such as they are, but nonetheless open to individuals who have awakened or come of age, as it were, in the flesh and in spirit. This sort of a rarefied world is as old in fact as its mystery tradition rooted in the wisdom teachings. It is within this mystical yet amorphous community of enlightened beings scattered across the four corners of the globe down through the ages that the term “nothing” acquires its nonstandard denotation. They look at phenomenal existence from the vantage point of a unitive consciousness, that is, they have awakened to the truth that the ground behind the concrete particularities out there is the One Supreme Reality which is in essence spiritual. The Hindus call it the Brahman, the Chinese call it the Tao. But these terms are but a mere designation or metaphorical nomenclature. In actual fact, the metaphysical Ultimate is unnameable. In other words it cannot be described at all in any linguistic category. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, the name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.³ At best it may only be referred to via negativa (negatively) and for the sake of convenience as the Name-less, the Un-created, the Im-mutable, the In-finite (Ein Sof), Not-this Not-That (Neti, neti) , etc.

Since the real Reality is transcendent, it is way beyond the bounds of the phenomenal world of appearances—at the same time that it inheres in it in its immanent aspect without in any way limiting itself. It is NOT A THING existentially conditioned. It is NO-THING. It is unmanifested and unspecified, beyond all forms of distinctions or differentiations. If to specify is to particularize, and if to particularize is to differentiate one manifested thing from another, then that which is the Non-dual Reality (“One without a second” according to the Upanishads) defies description verbally or symbolically since the Absolute is Nothing. Not one among the many. Words cannot be predicated of it. It simply IS. Or to put it another way, it is All in All simply because it is NO-THING—detached, unconcerned, not humane, impersonal. The Kabbalah, which is the core of the Jewish secret wisdom, says much to the same effect, thus:

The depth of primordial being is called Boundless. Because of its concealment from all creatures above and below, it is also called Nothingness. If one asks, "What is it?" the answer is, "Nothing," meaning: No one can understand anything about it. It is negated of every conception. No one can know anything about it—except the belief that it exists. Its existence cannot be grasped by anyone other than it.⁴

What is humane, personal, and particularized belongs to the domain of the phenomenal, visible world. After things were caused to be, they come within the ken of man and thus could be talked about, named, quantified, pinned down. In the realm of material things and individualized consciousness, one entity can be distinguished from the other. Right here and now, in the present order of existence especially of humans whose mind is governed by the logical categories of dialectics, the Aristotelian laws of thought—the law of identity, the law of excluded middle and the law of contradiction—are primarily operative.

However, the moment human reason grounded in the logic of Aristotle (Organon) and of Francis Bacon (Novum Organum) attempts to apply itself to extra-mundane matters or the hidden dimension of things, it proves to be hopelessly inadequate. This is the case because that which is outside the sphere of a three-dimensional world eludes our finite human mind that cannot help but think in linear, Euclidian terms. Will Durant, commenting on the philosophy of the Upanishads, wrote:

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain that aches at a little calculus ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment? Not that the intellect is useless, it has its modest place, and serves us well when it deals with relations and things; but how it falters before the eternal, the infinite, or the elementally real! In the presence of that silent reality which supports all appearances, and wells up in all consciousness, we need some other organ of perception and understanding than these senses and reason. ⁵

To the extent therefore that we remain hemmed in by time and space and continue to think in mental constructs woven by a mind conditioned in Aristotelian logic, to that extent are we doomed to failure in coming to grips with the problems of the spirit. The constricting confines of rational thought must be transcended by realizing that there are approaches to the Absolute other than the discursive or analytical faculty.

The light on the path of the Absolute is more successfully glimpsed through the inner eye, through insight or the intuitive mode of inner knowing. For Spirit can only be known through the eye of spirit, not the eye of the flesh or the eye of the intellect. The editors of The New Oxford Annotated Bible put it this way: "The Spirit we have received is God's own Spirit who knows what is in God, as our own spirits know what is in us." ⁶ To know Spirit or Reality is not the same as understanding it conceptually as though it were some kind of an intellectual abstraction. To know Spirit or Reality is to directly experience it. Those who have attained to it are however hard put to discursively verbalize their mystical experience. (That is why it is presumptuous of those who so glibly claim and proclaim that they know the Truth when as a matter of fact they do not really know whereof they speak. No one has any right whatsoever to talk about God, who has no direct experience of God in the center of his own being.)

It is in this respect that Lao Tzu said: Those who know [the Absolute] do not speak about it and those who speak about it do know [it]. Such supra-rational knowledge the Hindu sages refer to as Samadhi, the Zen masters calls it satori. To the Christian mystics it is the beatific vision; and to the modern-day mystic-sages it is called cosmic consciousness.⁷

It is said of Gautama Siddharta called the Buddha (meaning the Enlightened One) that all he did in handing down the Dharma to his possible successor was hold in his hand a lotus flower before the whole assemblage of monks. He did not utter a single word. This must be so because the heart of the Absolute Reality (The Supreme Spirit) plumbed by his expanded consciousness is metaphysical, beyond words, beyond particulars, beyond contradiction, beyond time and space. And it is in this non-ordinary realm where dualism ceases to apply, where there is the coincidence of polar opposites. Here is the point in which Euclid’s parallel lines meet at last; the point in which a thing can both be A and Not-A at the same time, the point in which one can hear the sound of one hand clapping or swallow the Pacific Ocean in one gulp. The language of paradox in this paraverbal context becomes profoundly expressive of the ineffable Truth as, for instance, when Lao Tzu says:

We look at it and do not see it;

Its name is The Invisible.

We listen to it and do not hear it;

            Its name is The Inaudible.

            We touch it and do not find it;

            Its name is The Subtle (formless).

            .....................................................

            Infinite and boundless, it cannot be given any name;

            It reverts to nothingness.

            This is called shape without shape,

            Form without objects.

            It is The Vague and Elusive.

            Meet it and you will not see its head.

            Follow it and you will not see its back.⁸

It should be evident by now that the “nothing” or “nothingness,” (what is not, non-being, nonentity, emptiness) which we have been referring to in this essay is not the same as the Western nihilism which denies all reality. Yasunari Kawabata himself emphasized this in his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture when he said that the Eastern counterpart of Western nihilism has quite a different spiritual foundation. Nor is it to be equated with the nothingness which the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre speaks of in ponderous prose as coiled in the heart of being like a worm.⁹ French existentialism juxtaposes being and nothingness as mutually exclusive opposites forever at odds with each other. Sartre thinks of nothingness as a complete negation of being, of that which IS.

The mystical mind, on the contrary, conceives of nothingness (what is not or nonbeing) as the unmanifested noumena behind the multiplicity of manifested phenomena. Hence, being (what is) and nonbeing (what is not) are in the final analysis not antithetical concepts but two facets or expressions of the same Reality. They are the two sides of the same coin, interpenetrating each other, so that in it are reconciled all the contradictions that befuddle man's mind in his spatio-temporal condition.

It follows that from the standpoint of consciousness attuned to the infinite and the timeless, the old conflicting dualities of matter and spirit, good and evil, life and death no longer hold true. What is the body but the expression of the spirit, and the spirit the form-giving principle? Good and evil are not in a deeper sense incompatible with each other. Hence, the criminal is not the future saint. In the sinner, in the words of Hermann Hesse, is already the saint [in potentiality], just as there is in the saint the streak of the sinner.¹⁰ “The good,” says Euripides, “is never separated from evil. The two must mingle, that all may go well.” Nothing is wholly good nor wholly evil. There is always something of one in the other in the same manner that there is always a yin element in the yang and vice versa. Life and death, too, are relative, not absolute. They should be viewed just like the succession of the seasons, or of night and day. Both belong to the same category in the light of eternity, though indeed distinguishable in the field of time.

If that is the case, the Sartrian dialectic of being and nothingness, subject versus object, would become telescoped or synoptically resolve itself in this rarefied context into one and the same unity in such a way that the knower is at the same time the known, the observer is the observed,¹¹ and in the end not really two incompatible nor separate entities. “What is immortal and what is mortal are harmoniously blended, for they are not one, nor are they separate,” says Ashvaghosha. It is this truth that makes it sensible to say, “That which is sin is also wisdom, the realm of Becoming [samsara] is also Nirvana.”

Only in the universe of discourse of nothingness or emptiness thus far considered may the old Hermetic principle “What is below (earth) is like what is above (heaven), what is above is like what is below” or simply "As above, so below" be more fully understood. And so with Lao Tzu’s claim that the world can be known without going out of the house. Again, if the assertion of another Chinese sage is true, that he and universe were made together of the same stuff, that man was kneaded of the same stardust as the innumerable celestial spheres out there, then it is equally true that what is without us is also within us. This is the philosophy behind the Delphic oracle's command to "Know thyself." For in knowing oneself one comes to know the universe. And the way beyond is within. This is so because man is the microcosm even as the universe is the macrocosm.

To say, therefore, as the Hindus maintain, that the little self that resides in the heart of man is not different from the Supreme Self encompassing the whole universe is after all not idle talk. The wisdom of the Hindu sages embodied in the Upanishads teaches the essential identity of the spark and the Flame, of the human and the Divine. Tat Tvam Asi, That Thou Art.¹² Here is a parable from the Chandogya Upanishad:

"Bring hither a fig from there."

"Here it is, Sir."

"Divide it."

"It is divided, Sir."

"What do you see there?"

                        "These fine seeds, Sir."

                        "Of these please divide one."

                        "It is divided, Sir."

                        "What do you see there?"

                        "Nothing at all, Sir."

            "Verily, my dear one, that finest essence which you do not perceive—verily from that finest essence this great tree thus arises. Believe me, my dear one, that which is the finest essence—this whole world has that as its soul. That is Reality. That is Atman. Tat tvam asi—that art thou, Shvetaketu."¹³

This is to say that the seed of the Eternal is found within man himself. Here is the supreme yet perennial wisdom disclosed to the mystics, the seers, the saints, the gnostics, the cabbalists, the rishis, the contemplatives, Bodhisattvas, etc. Jesus Christ Himself equally reveals the same mystery. In the Gospel of Thomas, He is recorded as saying:

If your leaders say to you, 'Behold, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds in the sky will get there before you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will get there before you. Rather, the kingdom is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and embody poverty.¹⁴

"The kingdom of God is within you,"¹⁵ Jesus told the Pharisees who asked Him as to when the kingdom was coming. Joseph Campbell, echoing Jesus, wrote: The kingdom of the Father is not going to come through expectation. We bring it about in our own hearts.¹⁶  This truth is likewise demonstrated in the Hindu everyday greeting of respect "Namaste!" when giving a namaskar. It means: I recognize or bow to the Divinity that dwells within you. In our deepest essence, we are one and not separate.

With those considerations in mind, it should not be difficult to see by now that NOTHING IS SOMETHING, or “non-X” is “X”, and insofar as the referent of “something” is the transcendent Reality, it cannot be any particular thing circumscribed in a label or concept. The logical validity in form as well as matter, of the axiom that nothing comes from nothing (“non-X” ≡ “non-X”) remains absolutely correct within the system of traditional syllogistic reasoning. On the other hand, in the convention of meaning within the realm of mystical reality just described, the seemingly contradictory statement, "Nothing is Something," or even "Nothing is All," becomes an expression not of fallacy but of a truth as inexorable, if not more so, as two and two makes four. In point of fact, "being" ("X," or “what is” or "form" ) is but the manifestation of "nonbeing" ("non-X" or “what is not” or "emptiness"); and "nonbeing" is the quintessence of "being." The latter is never outside of the former. Philosophic comprehension of this truth constitutes the wisdom of the enlightened sages. Experiential realization of it constitutes their immortality.

ENDNOTES

1 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (NY: Crown Publishers, 1982), passim.

2 P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (NY: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 236-237.

3 Gary E. Kessler, Voices of Wisdom, A Multicultural Philosophy Reader (CA: Wadsworth, Inc.,

     1992), pp. 225-226.

4 Daniel C Matt, The Essential Kabbalah (NY: Book of the Month Club, Inc., 1995), p. 67.

5 Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1963), p.412.

6 The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NY: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.231.

7 Richard Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (NY: E. P. Dutton, 1923), passim.

8 Kessler, p. 222.

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (NY: Washington Square Press, 1966), passim.

10 Hermann Hesse, Siddharta (NY: Bantam Books, 1971), passim.

11 J. Krishnamurti, The Awakening of Intelligence (NY: Avon Books, 1976), passim.

12 Upanishads, trans. F. Max Muller (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988), passim.

13 Ibid.

14 The Gospel of Thomas, saying 3.

15 Lk 17:21

16 Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion (NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), p. 169.