"PURE Being is transcendental. That means the I is outside the realm of conceptual thought (atakkavacara) . If our I, even prior to death, is atakkavacara then the question : " what will happen to me after death ? " is, metaphysically and logically, unaskable. The knowledge of the ontological constitution of my I cannot be of additional but only of the residuary-legatee type. Suppose I want more space in my room then I cannot fetch it from outside as I could a chair. I can only have more space in my room by removing the objects already there until only pure space (as a kind of residuary legatee) remains. The discarding of all thoughts, all signs, all characteristics reveals Pure Being. Having no distinctive traits it is hardly distinguishable from its opposite, Non-Being. The important point is that Pure Being is something more than a mere sum of all things having Being, just as Being is something more than the total of all things in existence. Here Jean Gebser has coined an important term, systase. It means a convergence of a series of perceptions into a unity that is greater than the sum of its parts ; an integrated whole is supposed to have a more complex Being. An integral insight Into systase gives us according to Gebser, synairese. This means an -insight into the reality of Being through the acquisition of a new kind of consciousness ; this intensified consciousness need not be mystical. According to Gebser all things are transparent the moment we perceive them in their essential wholeness (Ganzhebt). It is not indispensable to be a mystic to perceive that we live in a transparent world; the essential reality reveals itself to mystics and non-mystics alike. This revelation of transparence is called diaphanierung which means here the perception of the presence of any thing simultaneously in all its aspects both past and present. This is the official ontology of the expressionist school on the Continent and, is as such also called expression nistische phaenomenologie.
A similar ontology is to be found in chassidism, the East-European movement of Jewish religious revival which started at the beginning of the eighteenth century and whose exponent was the late Martin Buber. A central idea of chassidism is the unity of God and Nature. The ablest exponent of this view was the Maggid von Mesertisch to whom all phenomena are so many dresses put on by divinity. The Godhead is the inmost essence of all things, even those we otherwise condemn as filth. The devotee must, therefore, try to see through things until he perceives their core ; for the inmost core of all things is divine. The innermost Being of all existence is God. That is also the ontology of Vedanta and Taoism.
The secret of immortality is the insight that Being transcends Time. What is the correlation between Being and Time ?—and how does it affect our attitude to death ? That has been the main content of Western philosophy as represented by Heidegger and of Indian philosophy as represented by Radhakrishnan. For Heidegger, all existence is in bondage to Time. This gives rise to the radical insecurity of being which plagues man in the form of the fear that death could at any time upset his programme. But this insecurity should goad us into discovering the immortal in us. As Dr. Radhakrishnan puts it : " In the uncertainty of life we feel a distant certainty through which alone this uncertainty is made possible."
The angst of the existentialists can be conquered by a direct experience of the unchanging element of Pure Being through a process similar to what St. Thomas Aquinas called cognito del experimentalis. In such a direct experience man realizes that : ' time is not all, that death is not all, that it is possible to circumvent the time process...... Faith in such a non-object principle is the defeat of death and the renewal of life. When the spirit is affirmed, dread is annulled.
Note:
This article was published as it is in " The Mountain Path" Vol 7 No. 3 July 1970 and written by DR. P. J. SAHER.
About Dr. P. J. Saher:
Dr. P. J. Saher, a Parsi doctor living at Muenster in West Germany, is President of the Internationale Gesellschaft fur Religionsphilosophie und Geistesgeschichte. He is also a close friend of the Altbuddhistische Gemeinde of Utting am Ammersee, which has become The Mountain Path agent for
Germany and Austria.
Note : The only objective of sharing this article is to compile the thoughts and work of Dr. P.J. Saher at one place for benefit of his followers.
No comments:
Post a Comment