Letter #16: Something, or Nothing?

The one question every religion everywhere must ask.

Dad,

While on vacation I had a great time reading this Substack called The New Jerusalem. Have you heard of it? It’s awesome. Wonder who runs it.

Oh yeah: us. It’s good to be back. I see that in my absence you’ve decided against surrendering your consciousness to the annihilation of nirvana. I knew I could count on you to run things sensibly. And by the Providence that always seems to hover over our conversations, I think there’s something in this detour we’ve taken that can help with the central task confronting us, namely figuring out how to honor God’s image in humanity under the pressures of high tech.

The contrast you’ve identified between Something and Nothing, between the Christian and the Buddhist approach to ultimate reality, seems very profound to me. Actually I think every serious civilization has come up against this primal question: if we could dispel the smokescreen of our passing experience, what would we find? 

There’s this nagging suspicion that our most immediate, tangible sensations aren’t the whole story. It seems to come up everywhere. Plato’s Socrates thought he could gaze past the shining surface of the world to behold the essence of beauty, “simple and divine.” On my trip to the other side of the globe, I encountered a similar idea. In the eerie inner chambers of Cambodia’s ancient Hindu temples, you will often find a ruined “Shiva Linga”—an abstract hybrid of cones and polygons that is supposed to stand in for the supreme cosmic being. Intriguingly, in some varieties of the religion, that being is three in one: Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. Creator, destroyer, preserver. 

When they make contact with human consciousness, these eternal life forces take many forms, exploding into the riotous kaleidoscope of limbs and faces for which Hindu iconography is best known. But really these are only masks or avatars of an entity who surpasses them all, a blazing furnace of existence so full that it explodes the boundaries of every visible image.

Foreign though their sources are, these mysteries won’t be totally unfamiliar to any student of Jewish wisdom. Readers of scripture will also know of a name with no sound, a holy of holies too blindingly alive to be articulated in audible language or constrained by visible form: thou shalt make no graven images. 

Yet the real question is not whether the Divine Name can be spoken, but whether it can speak. Your problem with zazen was that it answered in the negative. It ended in a surpassing stillness, a final silent Nothing that calls our old frenemy Democritus back to mind: if human experience is an illusion, then the most real thing is the void. 

But if human experience is a language, then the unthinkable miracle has already happened: the Something that no eye has seen or heard, the Beauty that cannot be depicted, has chosen for Himself a suitable image in mankind. That seems, like, important. Also they have these little rice cake things in Cambodia that are just...*chef's kiss*.

Love,
Spencer