[Don Salmon]

Whit, I’m going to give you one more piece of background that might help make clear my own view.

I started studying the brain in the early 70s; it was around the time I started meditating. i was working as a profession musician and had not gone to psych grad school yet.

There were hemispheric theories that – despite Iain’s constant protestations – WERE exactly the same, psychologically, as what he is now proposing. The RH = emotion and LH = logic were NOT what the scientists doing good work were doing.

And as interesting as that was (I found the correlated descriptions in ancient Indian philosophy of far more practical use) I found Ernest Rossi’s studies of the brain and circadian rhythms and trance states – drawing on the work of 19th century psychiatrist Pierre Janet, who many now acknowledge as having a far more profound view of the psyche than Freud or most of his followers, or even Jung!) far more interesting.

Yet try as I could, I could never find anything in the brain studies that were useful for practice.

In the late 1990s, toward the end of my grad school studies, I was taking classes and attending seminars in neuropsychology, going to labs and seeing people actually working on brains (I mean, dissecting brains in the lab) and talking with friends in neurofeedback who were INSISTING that this was the way to go.

I’ve never found any literature showing neurofeedback to be fundamentally more effective than somatic therapies without any machinery. Similarly with biofeedback.

Fast forward a few years later, I was never personally that impressed with Rick Hansen’s writings, but I was totally blown away by Dan Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology. Unlike Iain, Dan has books full of very concrete practices associated with the brain. Now, I didn’t think this through very carefully, and soon enough I began including Dan’s practices in my workshops (pain management, general mindfulness and more).

By this time I was also working as a professional psychologist, often including neuropsychological testing in my evaluations (I’d get people with various forms of brain injury, dementia, etc). Now, over time, my students would challenge me and ask why they had to learn about the amygdala, vagus nerve, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cortical subcortical difference (there’s your conscious subconscious threshold)

And you know what? I never really had an answer for them. I asked others who were including neurological facts, and they would end up saying (as I STILL do) that enormous numbers of people just FEEL like you’re talking about something real when you talk about the brain. Hence, the title of our effortless mindfulness course, “Train Your Brain, Change Your Life.”

But I’ve gone from using anywhere from 10-20 neurological terms to talking about:

“The prefrontal cortex”

“The autonomic nervous system”

and…..

oh, “neural pathways.”

Now, there’s absolutely nothing about them that are NECESSARY for practice. But I know for certain, that the people who come to me for help dealing with habits, just consider it more scientific and more valid if I tell them that by bringing a neutral attention to the desire for sweets, they’re weakening the neural pathways associated with that craving, instead of saying, “well, you know, if you observe the craving in a neutral manner, it will weaken.”

It’s not even the same thing – because “craving” refers to a multi-layered experience, and “neural pathways” is really a limited, one dimensional image. Really, the neurological language has a placebo effect, and i would even go as far to claim, that’s really the value of Iain’s work. he’s talking to a world that still doesn’t quite believe in psychology, so when you give them the placebo tablet of neurological language, they believe in it and then it has real psychological and physical effects.

You know, i would go even one step farther. I’ve asked every psychologist, therapist, psychology professor I’ve met – “tell me just ONE thing that psychological science has discovered that was not known in contemplative literatures.”

One of the most common is the idea that modern psychology discovered developmental theory. Ken Wilber is one of the biggest promoters of this theory.

And it’s just not true. If you read the Tantric literature, you can find a complex developmental theory the likes of which nothing in the past 200 years of neuroscience and psychology has even come close to.

And I still like being a psychologist and still appreciate psychological research. It’s just good to see what place it has in the larger scheme of things. I mean, we have physical sciences for which there is absolutely no explanation for anything. nothing. We have no idea how laws of nature come about, what “forces” actually are, what “matter” is, anything. Science as practiced in the last several centuries simply is a highly developed form of engineering, it’s not a means of understanding anything.

[Don Salmon]

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. I think McGilchrist has written 2 of the most essential, important books of the 21st century. So don’t think I’m putting down his work.

I’m talking about practice, which, unless you can point to any place in his 4000 or so pages and countless videos that suggests otherwise, he doesn’t address at all (except to half heartedly mention “mindfulness” without giving any direction at all)

Now this is really cool – you have suggestions in this latest comment for how neurological understanding can inform practice. Let’s take a look (remember – to date, Rick hansen has steadfastly admitted that there’s NOTHING in all of neuroscience you need to know to practice, learn, etc. And Rick is a neuropsychologist who has been teaching practice for well over 20 years)

You write:

in addition to the unconscious-conscious threshold, there is also a threshold between the hemispheres. That’s to say, in our typical understanding of “the unconscious,” we may conflate conscious contents arising from the true unconscious, as it were from beneath consciousness, with contents as it were coming across from the less verbal side of the brain.

*******

Ok, so let’s look at what psychologists know about this, and I’m going to include psychology from India. Let’s see if neuroscience adds anything.

“The unconscious-conscious threshold.”

Right away – if everything exists in Consciousness (and there’s no empirical evidence that even hints otherwise) there can’t be anything that’s actually “unconscious.” A better term of mental-consciousness and submental-consciousness.

Now, is there any neuroscientific data that helps us understand this? In fact, you can’t tell from virtually any examination of the brain if consciousness is even present, so as far as any kind of mental/submental threshold, you can only know this from direct observation.

From over a century of parapsychological investigation, replicated thousands of times, we know that it’s possible to shift to a state of consciousness where it is possible to step out of our ordinary mental consciousness to be directly aware of submental phenomena. Yogis refer to this as prana, the Chinese as chi, indigenous populations speak of “mana” and many other terms. Meanwhile, the neuroscientists – 95% of them – refuse to even accept parapsychological data and insist that the universe is dead, unconscious. So here we get no help from neuroscience at all.

Now you speak of another axis – left/right hemisphere vs upper brain/lower brain (mental consciousness and submental consciousness).

What happens when you examine these phenomena through direct observation rather than simply looking at neuroscientific studies (and remember, where does virtually ALL psychological data come from in neuroscience experiments – by asking individuals what they’re thinking and feeling. And the vast majority of subjects in neuroscience experiments are usually completely untrained in introspection – this is why Alan Wallace has neuroscientific experiments with people who have meditated 10 hours a day for 9 months first!)?

This distinction between LH – psychologically, detached, selective attention and RH – psychologically, immersed global attention – has been described in virtually all contemplative literature, Christian, Vedantic, Buddhist, etc. Even Iain acknowledges this is not new. He says the neuroscience connection is helpful for modern skeptics, but it’s not at all new. That’s not a judgment just a fact. The astonishing observations in his books are from his intuition, not from the specific neurological experiments.

So, in direct introspection, one learns to distinguish:

A vast, non spatial, non temporal reality which is transcendent to the physical universe,

An intuitive knowing, global, immersed

A selective, analytic, detached attention

Pranic/or submental instinctive energies

A sense of a “separate me” which creates the illusion of a world of dead objects and dissociated subjects.

A separate me which is not a single “me” at all but a collection of subpersonalities often at odds with each other

an innermost center of consciousness which evolves through the ages, expressing through different physical bodies.

A non-spatial, non temporal individuated Self which expresses through that innermost center and which is distorted in expression through the egoic dominated mind, heart, energy and body, but which can learn to express fully leading to a profoundly transformed mind body.

Broad, universal fields of pranic consciousness, pervading the universe

Broad universal fields of mental consciousness, pervading the universe

Broad universal fields of intelligence beyond the mind, guiding all the forces in the universe.

All of that from direct observation, none of it even remotely revealed by studying the physical brain.

Once again, I’m not criticizing or judging Iain at all by saying this. In fact, HE SAYS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME THING.

To get back to your specific point, in practice – whatever one thinks in theory – when you look at the utter, multi-layered complexity of your moment to moment experience, you’ll find infinitely varying mixtures of intuitive/analytic attention along with mental/submental consciousness, interacting with universal planes of consciousness all related to the non-spatial, non-mental infinite, eternal consciousness transcendent to all universes as well as the cosmic intelligence guiding it all.

It’s certainly interesting to see some neurological correlations – but at the moment, we’re not even remotely approaching any IDEAS as to how to solve the hard problem of consciousness. We can’t even tell WHAT a person is thinking or feeling or attending to without asking them.

It’s great, it’s fascinating, but I just want to be careful that we see it in perspective.

[Don Salmon]

TLDR (too long didn’t read)

Whit, if my post seemed impossibly long (and absurdly occult or yogic)

Here’s a much easier question:

The two things you mention – conscious unconscious threshold, LH/RH threshold, and distinguishing what comes from what:

Tell me specifically, in a very concrete situation, how this would inform practice – and how it would do so in a way that direct yogic observation couldn’t.

So for example, you’re driving your car and someone cuts you off. You were in a great mood just the moment before and now your mind is busy coming up with strategies to “get back” at the person who cut you off.

What does the neuroscience add that helps you understand AND deal with the anger coming up?

[Don Salmon]

Couldn’t agree more. In fact, that’s the whole point of teaching effortless mindfulness and learning to shift to experiential mode.

You can be anywhere, no matter what is going on, or nothing going on, and simply sit with a mind free of all verbal thought in a state of bliss. Absolutely!

[Don Salmon]

Hi Rodney (Don here – not sure if it was clear, that was my comment on Dan Siegel, and yes I agree MUCH too complex:>))

But I want to make sure I let you know – I read your full paper of the education of the heart. Incredibly sweet and beautiful.

I have so many questions don’t know where to start.

But I do have one based on what you just wrote. You wrote of what I understand to be the integration of the Self and not-Self. You also write in your paper quite freely (and eloquently, I think) of God.

So here’s the question:

Not in terms of teaching others, but for yourself – after obviously having read many of the greatest mystics, saints, sages, etc – was there anything specifically in your own prayer practice that was new for you – I mean in terms of practice, not in terms of interesting information about the brain – that occurred when reading McGilchrist?

People think I’m criticizing or judging him when I speak like this, I’m not. I recall reading Haridas Chauduri, in a book I think he wrote either in the late 1950s or early 1960s, making exactly the same distinctions that McGilchrist does. There was a column of 2 modes of thought, with about 20 correlated terms, at least half of which are the primary terms that McGilchrist uses to describe the hemispheres. So perhaps I was just already familiar with all this when I came across his work in 2010?

NOw, I was spectacularly enthusiastic, not because it was anything new for me personally, or because I thought it would make a difference in terms of practice. But I was wondrous about the fact that this gave folks an opportunity to hear about something of fundamental importance that they simply wouldn’t accept coming from Chaudhuri.

You know, you quoted AJ Grayling critiquing McGilchrist, saying neuroscience is just not finely grained enough for the conclusions he makes. I remember this as a review that was quite negative of the hemisphere theory.

I wondered, “My gosh, do I actually agree with Grayling?”

Then I realized, yes, but with the opposite conclusion. Grayling rejects McGilchrist’s view of the different modes of attention because neuroscience, he says, doesn’t support it. I ACCEPT Mcgilchrist’s view of the modes of attention because it is obvious to me he has the intuitive capacity to see it, just as Chaudhuri did 60 or so years ago, just as the Upanishads, Gita, Vedas, and countless other contemplative texts describe it similarly.

What I don’t think is that the hemispheres alone account for the realization of God or the Self. I think that realization is infinitely beyond anything we know about the hemispheres, but also, I just don’t see even in McGilchrist’s concluding chapters more than a very distant glimpse of certain aspects of the beginning of the path to that Realization.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Whit:

Maybe you can help me out.

You asked at the end if there’s a way of mindfulness, or attention, that combines all these ways.

I’m having trouble figuring out why my writing doesn’t come across. I wrote:

“In open focus attention, you can choose to engage in any number of different ways of attending. “

<font face=”inherit”>This is exactly what you’re talking about. Les Fehmi wrote about and, unlike Iain, </font>actually<font face=”inherit”> taught people this process for over half a century. He conducted research on the </font>practices<font face=”inherit”> also – again, as </font>opposed<font face=”inherit”> to Iain who is wonderful and all that, but has little if any experience (I don’t know what he </font>does in his psychiatric practice, but I haven’t seen him mention this anywhere) applying these practices. Fehmi had thousands of patients, and trained Olympic athletes as well. People were cured of virtually every kind of physical pain syndrome, of severe depression and anxiety, of trauma, relationship problems, and improved all kinds of athletic skills.

But why focus only on the cortex?

That “awareness” (even Krishnamurti accepted this) is not “in’ the brain, but the brain and body are in awareness (as is the entire universe and all possible universes.

So we start with Awareness (Sat Chit Ananda)

Awareness obviously is associated with an Intelligence (the Logos, reflected in laws of nature, instinct in animals, intelligence in humans yet far beyond all of that) which manifests through the human mind, as analytic, selective, separative, detached attention, and immersed, global intuitive attention, manifesting in any particular moment in an infinite variety of ways, which can be surfed or navigated via Open Focus or what mindfulness was originally intended to be, far from the pop mindfulness of the past 50 years).

And then there’s emotion, instinct, impulse, of an almost infinite variety, and volition- at the instinctive, emotional, mental, and “supramental” levels.

That’s a minimum for a remotely adequate psychology – one that goes far far beyond these categorical RH/LH distinctions.

I spent 5 years writing a book about the yogic psychology of Sri Aurobindo, who himself brought together several thousand years of Vedic/Vedantic psychology as well as a vast trove of Western literature and philosophy (gleaned from his years as a star student in Greek and Latin at Cambridge). the psychology described in that book is infinitely more complex than what I touched on above, and simply using LH and RH categories can’t begin to capture this.

Then we get to neuroscience. I’mm sorry I’m probably prejudiced as a psychologist. I took 2 years of neuropsychology and I didn’t find anything useful from a practical standpoint (neuropsychological testing is actually as good or better than any of our brain-studying instruments in determining various kinds of tumors, strokes, etc but as far as understanding the psyche, almost useless – similarly, I fear, with neuroscience. Iain gets his insights from well being insightful, and then seeing correlations in neuroscience literature)

Oh well, I’m dashing this off in the midst of a busy day so i’m probably not doing well at all in getting across my point. But this stuff has been known for millennia. Regarding your idea about Buddhism, the entire Mahayana and in particular, the Tantric Buddhist schools, are all about reaching a level of mental, emotional and physical perfection which is thought impossible by our modern “scientists/engineers/technicians,” who look at patterns without any clue as to how they come about and think they’ve explained the universe!

[Don Salmon]

what a fascinating discussion. It’s unfortunate – from the bit I saw – that there seems to be no distinction between left hemisphere religious beliefs and integrated hemisphere/mind-body-world contemplative awareness.

The idea that someone can go through life believing in religion in a way that doesn’t take into account the realities of death is astonishing. It reinforces my sense, since the early 1970s. that the last people I’d ever want to talk with about spirituality are people involved in religion or academia!!!

Imagine Buddhist or Christian monk never contemplating death! “I die daily,” Paul said (I think it was Paul)

The Buddhist teaching of impermanence.

There’s a point, when your mind is absolutely quiet, when you actually feel, viscerally, as a sensation more real than the feeling of your body, that the whole universe is utterly dissolving at every moment. Death is occurring always, and rebirth always.

[Don Salmon]

Interesting thought about death.

There’s also the observation that we’ve never been born.

Ramana Maharshi has a great line about this.

He says, “you say you are here and then you go into town. But where is coming and going for the unborn, ineffable all pervading Awareness which you are in Truth?”

[Don Salmon]

I love it.

You know, there’s an episode of Seinfeld (do folks in England watch this, or even get the Jewish New York humor??) where Jerry and George (2 of the main characters) are pitching a comedy to the executive staff at NBC.

George insists that there’s no plot, the infamous “Show about nothing” (which is how the real Seinfeld show as panned for several years). He refuses to back down, and later, Jerry is worried that their show will be turned down as a result.

Giving George a hard time about it, George responds by saying “I refuse to compromise my artistic integrity.”

Jerry immediately shoots back, “you’re not artistic and you have no integrity” (you probably have to see it to appreciate the humor.)

Whenever I read about AI, I always think of that, and imagine someone responding, “you’re not intelligent and you have no integrity!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6rbH6WgTwY

[Don Salmon]

The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.

[Don Salmon]

Hmmm… the world of philosophy. Hmmm.

I’m not a trained philosopher; amateur – but started studying at 14 (over 5 decades ago) so I have a little glimpse of it.

Ah, I have an idea.

Several hundred years ago, (once upon a time>) God started having a tough time. The American founders wanted to mention God but were worried about religious wars AND about giving science a wider degree of freedom.

So God was taken out of everyday life and sent to a far off galaxy. Somewhere in the vast blue yonder, He had created this universe, and then settled off to admire his creation. ‘

Well, it hadn’t occurred to them, if you banish God from the cosmos, pretty soon, you’re going to think He’s not needed at all. Darwin was actually quite upset about this (he had initially trained to be a theologian, after all) but couldn’t avoid that conclusion.

So, now we get to the 20th century. Some folks were starting to see that maybe the idea of a dead, disenchanted de-Godified cosmos was not only not such a great idea, but my gosh, might even be wrong,.

But – and this is where the Absolute comes in – they couldn’t quite get comfortable with the idea of an omnipotent, omnipresent, God, so they made him a bit smaller:

Kind of a lonely, pathetic guy, can’t quite get it together, so he has to create the cosmos to fulfill himself.

Well, neither any traditional panentheist view, nor theist, nor Vedantic, Buddhist, etc notion EVER came up with this. It’s a stark contradiction.

Either the word “GOD” means omnipotent (there is no God but God, La Illah ha ill lahla (or something like that). Or even more powerful – All is Brahman. Or as Paul said, We live and move and have our Being in Him.

There is only One.

From this view, there never was a creation. There is no world and no universe.

****

Ok, I’ve just taken you from a fairy tale to a seeming impossibility. Let’s see if I can do one more thing and make a little sense of the idea that there is no creation.

What do you know, with absolute certainty, at this moment?

Not Descartes pale “I think therefore I am.”

There is awareness and this field of awareness (it’s not located anywhere, if you look closely – you might think it’s in your head but if you look a bit more carefully your head is within this awareness – look closely and you’ll see this awareness is all permeating (in other words, omnipresent)

Anything that’s omnipresent is obviously “doing” everything – hence, omnipotent (this doesn’t mean “all powerful” in the sense that there’s some subject – awareness – that can do anything – it means the only “thing” that’s doing anything is awareness, which is everywhere and everywhen all at once.

And it’s all “good” because it is doing only awareness.

I don’t know that any of this can make sense without practice.

When you see this, it’s the most obvious thing in the world that what we cal “moon” and “stars” and “earth” and “banks” and “cars” are images of awareness appearing to awareness.

And there was no beginning. It has “always” (timelessly, eternally) been this way – the silence of Siva and the ever ecstatic coming forth and dance of Shakti.

So the whole question of some God “needing” something actually makes no sense. It has nothing to do with “God” as the omnipresent Reality in which we/it live and move and have our/its being.

Better not to think about these things and just rest into the silence.

Try putting aside all reading and try my favorite meditation instruction of all time:

Do nothing.

It may come up that the hardest thing in the world is to understand what it means to do nothing.

Don’t even close your eyes. just sit. And don’t make any effort. Thoughts will come. Don’t do anything. Emotions will rise and fall. Don’t do anything.

At some point, you will experience directly that all is arising and falling away on its own, all as One Reality. If you continue doing nothing, you may also find that all thoughts fall away, and you’ll have a clearer glimpse of what this “universe” really is than any scientist ever had.

[Don Salmon]

Looks like I can no longer edit the previous note so here’s Thomas himself (as much a rebel against any limited idea of a “structure of Christianity” as just about any other 20th century monk)

AT THE CORNER OF FOURTH AND WALNUT, LOUISVILLE KENTUCKY

Here, the Catholic monk Thomas Merton describes an awakening experience he had one day in an ordinary shopping district in Louisville:

MERTON’S SATORI:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

“It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: ‘Thank God, thank God that I am like others, that I am only one person among others.’

“It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: …A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained.

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. They are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers! Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

[Don Salmon]

Two more I forgot to put in.

David Loy has written a wonderful book on nonduality, in which he explains the apparent differences and conflicts between nonduality in Buddhism, Vedanta, Christianity and Taoism. It’s a radically different understanding of “God” than you’ll get from almost any scholar or theologian. Personally, it took me at least 3 years of searching, starting at age 17, to come to the shocking realization that there were almost no rabbis, pastors, ministers or priests who were actually interested in the underlying contemplative teachings of their traditions. It took me many more years to realize this was true of almost all scholars as well.

Finally –

Father Martin Laird has written what I think is the best manual on Christian contemplative meditation in the past 50 years: “Into the Silent Land.”

B. Alan Wallace, who has studied and taught Tibetan Buddhism for over 50 years, and who since the early 1990s has focused on the Dzogchen tradition (which many have compared to Zen, Vedanta, Meister Eckhart’s teaching AND Taoist nondualism), has jokingly referred to Father Laird’s book as “the best Christian writing on Dzogchen I’ve ever come across.”

[Don Salmon]

Interesting. You might read Jon Blofeld’s “Secret and Sublime.”

It is very far from the scholar’s version of spirituality.

Blofeld had spent a lifetime practicing Buddhist meditation. He already understood that what Meister Eckhart meant by “the Godhead” was no different from the Buddhist Nirvana.

Funny, I’ll add as an aside, that just today a friend sent me a comment by Thomas Merton that the 3rd Century Desert Fathers’ understanding of God was much closer to that of the Zen tradition than most theology or scholarly understanding of it.

And perhaps you know of David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God: “Existence Consciousness Bliss,” in which he claims that the Sat-Chit-Ananda of the Indian tradition (the translation of which is existence consciousness bliss) is the underlying common grand of all spiritual traditions, including the Taoist – and remember, Hart may be among the greatest Orthodox theologians alive.

Anyway, back to Blofeld. He looked far and wide in 1930s China for someone who could speak to him of the very roots of the Taoist tradition and was referred to ‘an old sage”who lived atop a mountain. He climbed very high in very cold weather and when he got there, the sage was in the midst of meditation. he was quite irritable and exhausted, and sat somewhat stressed out waiting.

As he continued to wait, he became aware of strange but deeply blissful sensations and at some point felt he was expanding out to infinity.

Suddenly the experience came to an end and he was back to his irritable self. He realized just at that moment, the sage’s meditation had ended.

They had a long talk, and the sage dissuaded him from trying to connect Buddhist philosophic concepts with Taoist ones. He said there is only one Tao – some call it God, some Nirvana, some Allah. He added that he knew scholars would quibble, but then as long as one is caught up in verbal thought one can never understand this Oneness which is beyond Oneness

Toward the end of their conversation, Blofeld quoted the 19th century life of Buddha by Sir Edwin Arnold, where Nirvana is described as “the dewdrop slipping into the shining sea.”

The sage was impressed but added, “There is one limitation to your simile. Indeed, the dewdrop does merge with the ocean and become the infinite, but though this is inconceivable logical, though becoming the infinite, no individuality is lost – in fact, individuality is multiplied infinitely.

Final thought. Krishnaprem (a British man who was the first ever accepted into the Indian devotional order of Vaishnavas – a man who was a science prodigy as a child) writes about words and symbols in a fascinating essay. He recalled theologian Rudolf Otto’s discussion of whether Meister Eckhart’s Godhead, Shankara’s Nirguna Brahman, and the Buddhist Nirvana are the “same” or “different.”

What is the same and different, he goes on to ask. obviously, the words are different, and to some extent, the concepts are different, since Reality is Infinite and there are infinite aspects to it. But there is only one Reality, and there are not even a half dozen Absolutes floating around in the sky.

When you look at the extreme apophatic tradition going back to Dionysus, where you cannot say ANYTHING about God, it’s quite hard to argue THAT is the same or different that the Tao. For me, Paul said it best, quoting a secular Greek poet who lived several centuries prior to him, that the Reality the Jews referred to as “G-d” is that “in which we live and move and have our being.” Not just a “way” (the dharma, in Buddhism) but the dharmakaya – the whole universe being, in a way, a way – a way we live and move and have our being.

But if you completely eliminate all verbal thought – everything I just wrote, as Thomas Aquinas noted of his own lifetime of writing – turns to dust, and then all is clear.

[Don Salmon]

regarding the history of how we lost God, this is one of my favorite lines:

If, in seeking to create a purely objective science, you persist in eliminating all that is human in your scientific studies, you are likely to create a world in which no human will want to live.

Even more so, if you persist in trying to eliminate all that is Divine.