DID YOU KNOW?
THE SUBLIME, AND THE RIVER OF ETERNITY
Strictly speaking, the human problems that we can sense in the experience of the sublime (that which is awe-inspiring in works of nature or art), and in our awareness of the ceaseless flow of the river of eternity are not direct experiences, in and of themselves, of the cosmological (science that investigates the origin of the world), ground of being. But all three of them become linked together when we start trying to talk about spirituality, and the problems that the spiritual life is designed to deal with.
What all three have in common is first, our awareness of the enormous forces of nature and our inability to control them, and second, the fact that all three talk about brute scientific fact. We are not spinning comfortable little illusions about an imaginary God inside our own minds, and we are not falling into blind subjectivity and wishful thinking and superstition.
The biggest difficulty we have in appropriating some of wisdom of the past, is the fact that in much of western tradition, if we go back into the ancient and medieval period, philosophers and theologians were not talking about the cosmological ground of being (that out of which the Big Bang occurred), but about what I would prefer to call the epistemological (any theory that seeks to explain our belief system), ground of being.
There was a long and distinguished chain of Christian theologians who spoke of God as the epistemological ground of being, who formed a great ancient and medieval western tradition that went back through Meister Eckhart, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, Hugh and Richard of St.Victor, John Scotus Erigena, St. Denis, St. Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century, Origen in the third century, and St. Justin Martyr, the first Christian philosophical theologian, in the second century A.D.
The human mind receives data from all five senses, and constructs a picture of the external world by fitting that data into a pre-existing cognitive structure. I see a chair, and feel it as I sit in it, and my mind’s cognitive (having power of mental apprehension), structure tells me not only that this is what’s called a “chair” in English, but that it is for sitting on, and that it keeps me from hitting the ground (under the force of gravity) when I sit down on it correctly, and what color it is and all sorts of other information.
There have been many mystics however, down through the centuries (not only in the western world but also in India, China, Japan, and the Muslim world) that have believed that they could go into a meditative state where they could eliminate all conceptual thought and block out all the mind’s cognitive structures, and have a vision of the pure flux (any flow of matter; flow of the tide), of sense perception in totally unstructured form. I remain a little bit skeptical. Yes, one can shut one’s eyes while meditating and block off thinking about any other sense perceptions that are filtering in, but unless we are asleep or in a coma, some residual sense data will still be coming in. I can make my mind not focus on it, but it will still be there. The ancient and medieval mystics would not necessarily put it the way I am putting it, but that is the only way to describe what would necessarily happen if one practiced their meditative techniques. In spite of their claims, of necessity, there would still be some sense input coming into the mind.
But even more important, we must note that they were not, and could not, be in direct contact with the cosmological ground of being by using that strategy. Nevertheless, to the degree to which it was in fact possible to block out all conceptualization and all the higher cognitive structures of the mind, they would in fact be in some sort of contact with what I am calling the epistemological ground.
One perceives no universe full of “beings” (like chairs and trees and objects perceived as moving under the force of gravity and so on) in that mental state. This is the ground of being in the epistemological sense, because beings appear only when we reopen the conceptual and cognitive structures of our minds…
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