Identity and the Unborn

The Radiant Field:
Humans habitually form identity structures to protect themselves and help them attain what they think they want. And they do that in whatever context they find themselves.

Most people never recognize the unborn. If they’re rigorous and perceptive like Nietzsche, or they’ve gone through a major illness or loss, they might have caught a glimpse. But the natural reaction is not to relax into the openness, but to make sense of it by turning it into an object of conceptual analysis. Which leads to nihilism.

In response to the feelings of meaninglessness and ennui that typically arise from nihilism, people frequently fall into some form of ideological fundamentalism, like the contemporary waves of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, or the atheism that seeks to combat those moves intellectually. If they’re more sophisticated thinkers, they might follow Nietzsche and decide that meaning is self-authored. But that’s another form of fundamentalist authoritarianism, just making the self the absolute monarch. We can see this clearly in the NRx movement.

So facing emptiness unprepared can be quite harmful. Some nondual teachers, including some whose message is sharp and clear, choose to absolve themselves of responsibility by refusing to “teach.” These teachers can be great for those who are ready, but where does he leave all those who are not? And what of the heart?

Where are you leaving students who don’t quite get the message? What do they take away with them, since they will often walk away with some idea in hand?

Robert Saltzman:
Is your last paragraph a question for me? I’m not quite sure. And I am not clear on what you mean by “the unborn.”

The Radiant Field:
Yes, the question is for you.

The unborn is a term for the empty, cognizant, nature of experience. There’s lots of different names (the Tao, for instance, seems to be pointing at the same “thing”).

Robert Saltzman:
Thank you, Radiant Field.

Yes, I agree that we humans are quick to construct self-images that we imagine will protect us and advance our desires. This seems to be a biological built-in, as we can observe similar behaviors in our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees.

The term “unborn” carries Zen connotations that point toward something in experience. Look for where awareness begins; you do not find it being assembled. Look for where it ends; you reach no edge. I understand that usage, and it does point to something familiar about how experience is structured. But I would separate the report from the metaphysical system that often gets built around it. The confusion in many minds is that “the unborn” gets reified, treated as if there were such a thing, permanent and indestructible, when what is being pointed to is not a thing at all, but the absence of thingness, the looking that never locates its own beginning or end.

I would resist identifying the Tao with “empty, cognizant nature” as though the two were equivalent. The Tao Te Ching is notably cautious about what the Tao is. That reticence is the point. “The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.” It resists the kind of specification that nonduality typically supplies, which is part of why I find it philosophically more lucid than Advaita.

The Tao operates in two modes. As the ultimate ground, it resists naming, which the opening line of the Tao Te Ching makes explicit. As a practical framework, it points toward the observable patterns of the natural world, the way rivers flow, seasons turn, and living systems move. It is the second mode that engages me, because it points at something observable rather than asking to be taken on faith. The text’s reticence differs from much nondual discourse, which tends toward intricate characterizations of what it also calls beyond all description. As philosophy, Taoism avoids specifying the unknown, although some forms of Taoism have become as institutional and credulous as any religion.

The word “absolute” deserves particular scrutiny, not as the theologians of “neti, neti” used it, who knew exactly that it could not be delineated and made avoiding reification their discipline, but as it circulates in contemporary nonduality discourse, where it is used constantly and almost never examined. An absolute, so defined, is unconditioned, unlimited, and beyond all specification, and so, beyond correction. This makes it the ideal screen for projection. Whatever the teacher or student needs it to be, it accommodates. Whatever objection arises, the absolute absorbs it. The word functions not as a philosophical concept but as a blank check drawn on an account that cannot be independently audited. That is not philosophy. It is theology without the clarity to call itself that.

On your question about students who don’t quite get the message: I am not a teacher in the sense you mean, and no one should regard oneself as my student. This is not a clever denial. I describe what I observe as clearly as I can and leave it there. If someone learns from that, fine, but I am not transmitting a body of knowledge, only clarifying my own view. My words reflect my experience, nothing more. I do exercise discretion in what I say, which means I attend to how it might land, so I am not indifferent to effect. But my responsibility ends at what I say. What people make of it is theirs. Most of my readers take what is useful and leave the rest, which is as it should be.

Your concern about leaving unprepared people exposed to emptiness is real, but I think the solution is more examination of what can and cannot be known, not less. In my view, the frameworks that promise to fill the gap tend to cause more harm than the gap itself.

Stephen Pearson:
Haha, was going to say that reply was worth restacking. Robert just then saw it was :)

Robert Saltzman:
Right, Stephen. After posting it, I reread it a few times. What most grabbed me was how it distills countless conversations, essays about those conversations, and even my books into so few words. It’s almost as if the prose were a framework or skeleton on which the most trenchant of all those words can be displayed for examination.

These are ideas I’ve held for many years, like objects to be examined from many angles. Ideas about which I debated with nonduality mavens, religious believers, professional spiritual teachers, etcetera, sometimes rashly. When I read them here, all of that is contained, but nothing about it is rash.

Stephen Pearson:
I feel you have helped many, though, more than you will ever know . Obviously, not everything you say, but that’s not the point. Something comes through in ways when it shows up and just lands right. I’m sure the books will go on for future generations, Robert, as more people want to get real. It’s time for the new wine in old bottles to be seen for what it truly is :) As you say on the Tao, the unspeakably of it. The unknown stops in the Unknowing. So stop digging. But not many will simply stop. Btw, I owe you a huge thanks for mentioning Toni Packer somewhere in your posts, I think it was. I just instantly hit it off with her wisdom can I call it? I would never have known of her other then your saying. We can only truly work with what is. Take care, Robert. All the best to you all.

Robert Saltzman:
Thank you, Stephen. If anyone is helped by something I say, I’m happy. But your next sentence is the key: “Obviously not everything you say.” Right! I see the clarity in much of what I say, but not all of it, and sometimes, looking back at things I’ve written, I ask myself, “What was I thinking?” When conversing with someone who can hear me critically and with due skepticism, I feel free to dive right into the ambiguity that seems central to philosophical understanding. When I do, I could err. I could be wrong. It’s helpful if the reader knows that.

As Radiant Field was saying, there is a concern that my words, if taken as final, could be discouraging, disheartening, or worse to someone who hears them as authoritative. I have to accept that, because the ideas arise in the same system that is not disheartened by them. There is no way to speak otherwise.