The Ground of Being

 Some words of others tend to stay with me. They often pop back into my mind. An example are these, written by the Catholic Scholar Heinrich Dumoulin:-

Whether, on its deepest ground, being is personal or impersonal, is something that humans will never be able to plumb by their rational powers. Here we face a decision which one makes according to one's own tradition and upbringing, and still more according to one's faith and experience. The Christian sees ultimate reality revealed in the personal love of God as shown in Christ, the Buddhist in the silence of the Buddha. Yet they agree on two things: that the ultimate mystery is ineffable, and that it should be manifest to human beings. The inscription on a Chinese stone figure of the Buddha, dated 746, reads......

"The Higest truth is without image.
If there were no image at all, however, there would be no way for truth to be manifested.
The highest principle is without words.
But if there were not words at all, how could principle possibly be revealed?"

(Well, my grandaughter, when not yet three, was not to be fooled. After a year or so of "grandad's special pizza" she saw through the whole thing.........."THAT'S not pizza, that's cheese on toast". And Grandad, chastened, retired to the kitchen to lick his wounds)

As I've said before, I am a non-theist, preferring the "silence of the Buddha". Yet interested in exactly where the dividing line falls between theism and non-theism - if anywhere.

Back in the day it was recognised by those who pursued "truth" that God could not exist in the same way that objects, or we ourselves, "exist". The ultimate source of all Reality is more the Ground of existence/being, the "ground" in which we live and move and have our being (as the Good Book says......)

This has largely been forgotten and many now simply say that until God demonstrates "his" existence to them then they will remain sceptical. Obviously any testimony of another will not be sufficient - and why should it be?

Yet some modern Christians, such as Paul Tillich and Thomas Merton do seek to explain all this. Merton actually traces the evolution of this fairly modern phenomenon of demanding that God show himself......He goes back to Descartes, where the search for truth and meaning was placed upon the thinking "I" as the one certainty. "I think, therefore I am". Merton shows how such a base will inevitably lead to a God as "object", out there, or up there, a God who will depend upon our will for his existence. And such a God will die, as per Nietzsche. So we live, in the west, with the death of God. Yet the ultimate source can never cease to be. Merton proposes another source of Being, in opposition to Descartes, which is one of the "ground", as spoken of above. (All this in his fine book of essays "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" - available from all good bookstores....)

In the "east" rather than "Ground", emptiness is spoken of, "sunyata", often bringing down accusations of nihilism and suchlike nonsense. But as one wag once said, we must place our feet upon the firm ground of emptiness, or as per the great Christian mystic St John of the Cross once said, if we wished to tread truly then we should close our eyes and walk in the dark.

Well, maybe enough for now.