More waffle

Joseph Campbell has said:-

But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one's god. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear. There is nobody there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all concepts, has dissolved in identification with the ground of your own being, because that to which the metaphorical image of your god refers to the ultimate mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well.

I am beginning to understand, the "eastern" quest is more the realisation of non-duality within duality. In that sense forms do not "disappear",  and simply because no "one" is there, everything, and everybody, is there.

I agree with the "beyond concepts", even with speaking of the "ultimate mystery". If it was not a "mystery" it would be a "something", an end product, a conclusion - whereas Reality is a constant advance into novelty.

 "Not knowing why, not knowing why! That is my support! Not knowing why! That is the namu- amida-butsu!" ( Saichi)

Or Eckhart:- "Love has no why"

Keats:- "Nothing of worth is known by consecutive reasoning"

Really, it gets back to some intuitive things that I have always asserted - that life, truth, reality, can be lived but not thought. 

Non-duality is not that "all is one" but that all is not two. Another thing entirely. Edwin Arnold ended his poem of the Buddha, "The Light of Asia" with the words:- "The dewdrop slips into the shining sea" - which is wrong, more in keeping with our "self" dissolving as it unites with "our God". It is more that the shining sea slips into the dewdrop, or even better, that the ten thousand things are truly realised for the first time. 

I see that this relates to Dogen's words in his "Genjokoan" (the actualisation of reality) :-

Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization.

I realise that this can all seem like much ado about nothing, yet thinking about it, it is!

T.S.Eliot:-

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

 

Sometimes it just seems that I am just juggling words about, almost a way of no-calculation, yet sometimes there are surprises. But it does seem much like Eliots words, of "knowing the place for the first time", which relates to D.T.Suzuki who speaks of becoming once again the Tom, Dick or Harry we have always been. There is no nihilistic dissolving into an ultimate "Thou".

There is a theodicy here, but it is beyond me at the moment. I suspect that it will always be.