The Inevitable Ecstasy, Part 20: The Line of Least Resistance

So what I’m showing you is that all this hocus-pocus about the fear of nothingness is that, truly speaking, ‘nothingness’ is what we want to talk about when we talk about the spiritual. Only, it’s all been ignored! It’s all been put down! You say, Oh, nothingness, blegh! Heaven preserve us from that! But that’s where the secret lies! And obviously the secret always lies in a place you never think of looking for it.

In mythology this comes again and again. Okay—this is Christmas—where is the Christ born? In a palace? No. Where no one would think of looking: in pigsty. Although, I have a Japanese friend who once said to me—he said, You know, the real difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that Christ was the son of a carpenter and Buddha the son of a prince. (I thought that was rather funny.) Well, we don’t know who the prince is without the carpenter, do we?

Now, it’s in that sense, really, that I could suggest to you that you meditate on nothingness. I know you can’t think about it. But yet, when it becomes perfectly clear to you that that’s what you are, and what you were before you were born, where can anybody stick a knife into you? Fundamentally, you see? Alright. Get it? Because this is really the secret to the whole thing. If you see that—now, we want to go on and be able to answer all the people who will come bug us about it, because whether you say anything about it to other people or not, people are going to bug you about this and say, Oh, no, no, no, no. Here—you really are something. You know, you—you’ll know it. Wowee! Life isn’t the way you think. La la la la la. It’s gonna be awful, see, I mean real! Woo! And they’ll say, Okay, where in such a philosophy as this is there any basis for the love of one’s fellow man? For joy in children? For cultivating gardens, for doing this and that and the other? See? There is no basis in it! That’s the same way there is no basis in emptiness for form; or so it seems. But only precisely to the degree that you have discovered the nothingness that you are, you find that you are suddenly full of energy. That is energy. It’s the source and origin of energy. So that when, you know, when there’s sort of nothing in your way, then you can do exactly what I was describing as having this glee for going into doing this, that, and the other thing, and being thoroughly creative.

But you can’t be creative out of just plain somethingness. You need nothingness to be creative. And that’s what we are. And this, too, is real nothingness; it’s not darkness, it’s not like being buried alive forever, it’s not like rest. Even when the Catholics sing:

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord.
And let light perpetual shine upon them.

This isn’t rest, because it isn’t motion. Neither motion nor rest. What is it? Nobody can imagine. And it’s at that point, you see, where the imagination completely runs out and stops. there we’ve hit the thing. See, there you are, right at the fundamental mystical reality. Now, what this is we are talking about, is what mystics have quite often discussed. This isn’t read very much. It’s a state called agnosia, which means ‘unknowing.’

There’s a book called the Cloud of Unknowing, written by an English monk in the 14th Century. But it’s based on another book called Theologia Mystica, which was written in the 6th Century by an unknown Syrian monk who used the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. Absolutely fascinating, very short little book—which I translated long ago, back in 1943, and I’m about to reissue it. But this book ends up with a description of God which is all in negatives. Not any kind of anything you can imagine at all. Not light, not power, not spirit, not fathershood, not sonship, not this, that, and the other—all the way down the line. Everything that anybody’s ever said or thought about God is denied. Because God is infinite, and therefore beyond the reach of any conception at all. So he says that anybody who—having a vision—thought he saw God, would not have seen God but some creature that God has made who is less than God.

So again, you approach—in a Christian context, said in such a way that even Saint Thomas Aquinas bought it—that you can’t impute heresy to it. Because everybody’s got to agree that God is the which in which there is no whicher, and this guy spells it out. So, in the same way, you get Nagarjuna saying that the ultimate reality is śūnyatā, voidness.

So Shankara gets at it when he says, That which is the knower or the knowing in everything can never itself be an object of its own knowledge; for fire doesn’t burn itself, although it burns other things. So we never know what the Brahman is, just like the eyes don't ever see the head. If you put something there, you are stopping short of nothing and you don’t get the whole benefit of it, that’s all. If you insist that there is something there, that there is the Loving Father at the end of the line, or the Paradise Garden, you are really cheating yourself. Because it’s only when you have thorough emptiness and real downright nothingness at the end of the line, that you get the full impact. No holds. Look, mama, no hands! See?

Now, I really think that’s the simplest thing I can possibly tell you. I really don’t know what else there is to be said about this whole Zen project, or mysticism, Vedānta, what have you. It comes down to that, and there are infinitely many ways of evading. But what I’m trying to point out to you, you see, is the way in which you see the point [is] by taking the line of least resistance. By facing the facts. By not super-adding to truth something you contribute to it; your own business that you put up. But saying, If I follow what I can see, or can see with my senses, to be reality as far as we can look, it seems that this is sort of the inevitable conclusion. Which everybody has spent endless effort in arguing about and resisting. Not realizing that—if they went the whole way—how splendid it would be. And that’s all you have to do.