ARRIVING AT SILENCE
Everyone asks me about
what will happen when they finally arrive. Is this just curiosity? We’re always
asking how would this fit into that system, or whether this would make sense in
that context, or what it will feel like when we get there. Get started and you
will know; it cannot be described. It is said widely in the East, “Those who
know, do not say; those who say, do not know.” It cannot be said; only the
opposite can be said. The guru cannot give you the truth. Truth cannot be put
into words, into a formula. That isn’t the truth. That isn’t reality. Reality
cannot be put into a formula. The guru can only point out your errors. When you
drop your errors, you will know the truth. And even then you cannot say. This
is common teaching among the great Catholic mystics. The great Thomas Aquinas,
toward the end of his life, wouldn’t write and wouldn’t talk; he had seen. I
had thought he kept that famous silence of his for only a couple of months, but
it went on for years. He realized he had made a fool of himself, and he said so
explicitly. It’s as if you had never tasted a green mango and you ask me, “What
does it taste like?” I’d say to you, “Sour,” but in giving you a word, I’ve put
you off the track. Try to understand that. Most people aren’t very wise; they
seize upon the word—upon the words of scripture, for example—and they get it
all wrong. “Sour,” I say, and you ask, “Sour like vinegar, sour like a lemon?”
No, not sour like a lemon, but sour like a mango. “But I never tasted one,” you
say. Too bad! But you go ahead and write a doctoral thesis on it. You wouldn’t
have if you had tasted it. You really wouldn’t. You’d have written a doctoral
thesis on other things, but not on mangoes. And the day you finally taste a
green mango, you say, “God, I made a fool of myself. I shouldn’t have written
that thesis.” That’s exactly what Thomas Aquinas did.
A great German
philosopher and theologian wrote a whole book specifically on the silence of
St. Thomas. He simply went silent. Wouldn’t talk. In the prologue of his Summa
Theologica, which was the summary of all his theology, he says, “About God,
we cannot say what He is but rather what He is not. And so we cannot speak
about how He is but rather how He is not.” And in his famous commentary on
Boethius’ De Sancta Trinitate he says there are three ways of knowing
God: (1) in the creation, (2) in God’s actions through history, and (3) in the
highest form of the knowledge of God—to know God tamquam ignotum (to
know God as the unknown). The highest form of talking about the Trinity is to
know that one does not know. Now, this is not an Oriental Zen master speaking.
This is a canonized saint of the Roman Catholic Church, the prince of
theologians for centuries. To know God as unknown. In another place St. Thomas
even says: as unknowable. Reality, God, divinity, truth, love are unknowable;
that means they cannot be comprehended by the thinking mind. That would set at
rest so many questions people have because we’re always living under the
illusion that we know. We don’t. We cannot know.
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