Q. Is it possible for a human to fathom the true depths of reality and existence?
A (Martin): By the evidence of the ages – of innumerable sages and mystics, their outpourings, and the teachings they left us that are like the fruits of wonderful trees – the answer has to be yes! They tell us, especially to those capable of fathoming their words (‘those who have ears’), that the depth of understanding what is real and inescapable, reality itself, is practically limitless, to the point of becoming one with it in a seamless unit – no more subject-object distinction, the root of suffering.
And that is so because, as Matthew Arnold put it referring to some people: … ‘He who makes the determined effort to see life steadily and see it whole…’. There is a caveat, though: ‘Without love, the mind cannot understand’ – Sine desiderio mens non intelligit (Nicholas of Cusa). Is love anything more, or other, than that determination Matthew Arnold was speaking of? That is a high price, or is it not?
Dear Martin,
When he writes of seeing life steadily and whole, Matthew Arnold is not ‘referring to some people’ but to Sophocles, one of his lifetime guides to fruitful living; nor does he mention making ‘a determined effort’.
Arnold writes,
“Be his
My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild:
Who saw life steadily and saw it whole.”
In his ‘On Learned Ignorance’ Nicholas of Cusa says this about our ability to understand ‘reality itself’: “It is clear…that all we know of the truth is that the absolute truth, such as it is, is beyond our reach. The more profoundly we learn this lesson of ignorance, the closer we draw to truth itself.” Nicholas’ thought rests in the paradox or mystery that while individuals exist in number, weight and measure, and God exists without being added to or diminished by these individual things, both exist without confusion in each other. Within this unknowable whole the individual lives in both humility and dignity.
Salud!
Riekert, thanks for a rich, illuminating comment. M.
Hello Martin.
Without love, the mind cannot understand.
Sine desiderio mens non intelligit.
– Nicholas of Cusa
Lovely quote. Love means so many different things to different people/contexts. What do you think Nicholas meant by love here?
Rick
Hi Rick,
I don’t wish to steal Martin’s thunder and realize we’re off the beaten path here so I beg Dennis’ indulgence, but to answer your question – ‘desiderio’ is properly translated ‘longing’ or ‘desire’. For Nicolas, mystical theology is an elevated wisdom dangerous for the ‘unlearned’. Part of its danger results from the fact that to those accustomed to conventional reasoning, the statements of mystical theology will sound ‘strange and discordant’ and will often seem to ‘contradict themselves’. Because of this an intense desire to understand is crucial; for this alone will motivate the ‘unlearned’ to persist in a way (via) which seems to confound ordinary reason. In his dialogue ‘Idiota de sapientia’ Cusa has one character, the orator (i.e. philosopher), persuade the layman to continue only by convincing him of his ‘impassioned desire’ to learn more about this ineffable wisdom. And in fact, the greater part of the first half of the book concerns the affective state required by the mystical disciple in order at all to proceed in learned ignorance.
Cheers
Rick,
Thanks for the response.
Love and passion, desire for knowledge, realization, enlightenment all makes sense. Mumukshutva, right?
But I wonder if it goes beyond that into the love as felt connection and shared being? What do you think?
Rick
I suppose the basic problem with the word ‘love’ is that, in everyday usage, it always refers to something else or someone else. And, of course, in reality there IS nothing else. ‘Love of Self’ is likely to be interpreted by most people as narcissism. So I agree with Rick R here – it refers to ‘love of truth’; the overrriding desire to discover the ‘meaning of life’ etc. Maybe not so far from mumukShutva?
Dennis
Dennis,
Mumukshutva is what I thought of too. Hunger and passion for Truth. Was the author Nicholas of Cusa a soft/hard nondualist? If he wasn’t he might have been using ‘love’ to refer to a lover and loved.
Thanks!
Rick
Hi, Rick and Rick R,
Pardon me, I am not familiar with the work of Nicholas of Cusa.
But recently I happened to post a short excerpt “On Love” at an FB Group. I copy-paste below:
On Love:
Did you experience those indefinable pangs of sweet pain and longing to be in close proximity with the object of your love?
Does not matter what it is that made you pine for it. It could have been a particular model of a car or an intense desire to visit a place or the attractiveness of the other person. Or it could have been even the deity, your personal or favorite god or goddess.
You feel a passionate yearning to be with the cherished object – be that may a thing, a person or a God. You desire to tightly hug or possibly meld into it, and close the gap of perceived separation between you and the object of your adoration. You like to erase the distance between the two of you. You want to unite with it. You want to be one with it. You want to merge into it. You want to forget your ‘personality’ and dissolve your ‘sense of separate self,’ into the object of your worship. You wish that all the borders that set you apart as a distinct ‘person’ should just evaporate.
***
Love for many of us is a feeling that defines the way “I” connect to the “other.” We usually conceive it to be a parameter that governs the relationship between two human beings or a person and a thing. And mostly it is seen as an obsessive feeling mixed with deep emotion. Our culture glorifies such an emotion; poets write sentimental ballads; composers make soulful music; singers render melodious tunes; writers and artists immortalize it through their stories and paintings or sculpture. Love triangles and quadrilaterals, jealousies and cheating are the standard staple for cinematic drama, novels and even myths.
But we often wrongly define what love is because of our misunderstanding. Youngsters mistake their testosterone-driven lust to be love and some romantics project their infatuation as love. The much-admired mother’s love for her newborn and the young ones, pardon me for saying it, is also a misnomer. It is actually the natural protective genetic instinct of the mother, driven by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, in the interest of the propagation of her progeny.
Quite often we also see that what we name as mother’s love is a feeling of possessiveness on the part of the mother for her little ones. If it is truly an expression of selfless Universal love towards one and all, the mother’s love would not have been confined to her own offspring! As people age and become more and more dependent on one another, a bond develops between any two mature adults. Even this relationship cannot be called strictly love. It is a reflection of their growing mutual dependence because each one is in need of the other, once again the hormone oxytocin playing a role in sustaining the attachment between the two.
Therefore, much of the claptrap that usually goes by the name of love is emotional stuff that belongs to the domain of the emotional mind and it is not, really speaking, true Love!
Please appreciate that whatever I stated above should not in any way be taken as a condemnation of the affectionate relationships between individuals. Nor is it a denigration, even remotely, of this emotion. I do not even suggest that such a relationship is of an inferior variety.
These feelings have undoubted value and possess irrisible significance in the maintenance of a sane order in human interactions. They contribute enormously towards the sustenance of a healthy society.
But what we are discussing here is pure philosophy. You may call it utterly theoretical; but let us persist with the arguments and see where they will lead us to.
Love, in fact, is the absence of “otherness.”
Love is that indefinable quality of complete Oneness. There is no sense of a separate ‘me’ existing here screening, judging, allowing or disallowing some other person or thing distinct from me to appear. Love is like the open space that welcomes all.
— From the Article “The Enigma of Deep Sleep” by yours truly.
Nicholas being a mystic, perhaps, realized “Love” as the “absence of otherness,” which really happens when the individuating “me-ness” is dissolved!
regards,
Ramesan,
Your and my understanding of love are virtually identical. And thank you for saying you don’t denigrate conventional forms of love. We humans do the best we can.
I see love as a felt-sense of shared being. Loving and liking are nontrivially different things, not to be confused.
Rick
Hi Rick R,
Now that you are wiser and older (perhaps after several K e-lations), and having heard Shankara at 4.3.21, BUB, you agree that “we remain happily convinced” on what true Love is!
And I am sure Rick doesn’t disagree.
LOL LOL
Cheers,
Hi Rick
Your quotes I believe come from Guru Vachaka Korai – though I’m not sure about the last quote.
GVK was written by Muruganar, and reviewed by Ramana. Muruganar was a married householder, who gave up married life to become a sannyasin at Ramanashram – even though his wife pleaded with him not to do so. He was given to poetical exposition, and Ramana rarely changed what others had written, unless it was outright wrong.
Hi Venkat,
You’re right about the Ramana quotes. The third is section number 586 on page 249 of the David Godman edition. And yes, as Ramana’s disciples generally regard Guru Vachaka Korai as the most authoritative collection of his spoken teachings, largely because they were personally checked and revised by Ramana, there is no reason to think that Muruganar has misrepresented those teachings, though his literally bent may have made them more pointedly repellent.
As an aside, when my wife read those passages she turned to me and said “fear and loathing in Tiruvannamalai’.
All the best
Ha! I typed ‘literally bent’? Should have been ‘literary’. One too many beers, I suppose.
Hi Rick, when you read Ramana’s written works, or Maharshi’s Gospel, or Talks, you never get a sense of the tone with which Muruganar wrote those verses. Ramana did not condemn people’s lifestyles or tell them how to live; and nor did he differentiate between sexes. So I think it is reasonable to assume that this is Muruganar’s own predilections being overlaid on Ramana’s teaching of letting go of desire.
There is also this quote. on love, attributed to St. Augustine:
‘Love and do what you will’, which has profound implications. You have all probably read/heard it previouly.
Dear Martin,
Heretics, Augustine believed, imperil their “spiritual health”; they are destined to suffer the torments of hell. Thus, those who truly “love their neighbor” will recognize their “duty” to compel these “wandering sheep.” Righteous persecutors are like physicians who try to help a “raving madman,” for heretics “commit murder on their own persons.” When motivated by love, persecutors cannot do evil: “Love and do what you will.”
Profound implications indeed, especially for those on the receiving end of Augustine’s ‘loving’ touch.
In his essay “What I Believe” Bertrand Russell analyzes the components of the good life:
“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life. In the Middle Ages, when pestilence appeared in a country, holy men advised the population to assemble in churches and pray for deliverance; the result was that the infection spread with extraordinary rapidity among the crowded masses of supplicants. This was an example of love without knowledge. The late war afforded an example of knowledge without love. In each case, the result was death on a large scale.
Although both love and knowledge are necessary, love is in a sense more fundamental, since it will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge, in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love. But if people are not intelligent, they will be content to believe what they have been told, and may do harm in spite of the most genuine benevolence. Medicine affords, perhaps, the best example of what I mean. An able physician is more useful to a patient than the most devoted friend, and progress in medical knowledge does more for the health of the community than ill-informed philanthropy. Nevertheless, an element of benevolence is essential even here if any but the rich are to profit by scientific discoveries.”
Regards
I was taken by his three passions
https://www.advaita-vision.org/bhakti-jnana-and-karma-yoga-reinterpreted/
[…no sabiendo, toda ciencia trascendiendo.] Este saber no sabiendo es de tan alto poder, que los sabios arguyendo jamás le pueden vencer; que no llega su saber a no entender entendiendo.
[… not knowing, all science transcending]. ‘This unknowing knowing is of such power, that the wise, “arguing” as they may, can never surpass; for their knowing does not reach to the knowing that is an unknowing. –St. John o the Cross.
Dear Martin,
You may be interested in perusing Aryasomayajula Ramamurty’s instructive if not wholly unbiased comparative study of the theologies of Shankara, St. John of the Cross, and the great Sufi mystic and poet Rumi in the last chapter of his book “The Advaitic Mysticism of Sankara”.
Kindest regards