In part one, we saw how our intuitive understanding of the universe is most likely fundamentally wrong. Here, we will see to what degree it is wrong – by challenging reason itself.

Without form, without figure, without resemblance am I;

Vitality of all senses, in everything I am;

Neither attached, nor released am I;

I am Consciousness, I am Bliss, I am Shiva, I am Shiva. Adi Shankara, Nirvana Shatakam

Aristotle‘s Law

Aristotle taught that there was a hard, logical boundary that couldn’t be crossed called the law of non-contradiction (LNC). It states that opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time.

In the words of Thomas Aquinas centuries later: A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same respect.

This classic rule of logic merely states, rather obviously, that A is not non-A; a thing is not literally its opposite.

It is to reason what we once thought the atom was to matter: the most fundamental part which couldn’t be broken down further. Every rational thought rests on this law.

As Aristotle observed, it is self-evident; as soon as one understands the definition of the law of non-contradiction, they are forced to agree with it. To deny it is to simultaneously affirm it.

But, perhaps we cannot even conceive of a violation of the LNC because it cannot be spoken.

What else is reason than an inner dialogue, a silent language which is always distinguishing, contrasting, and comparing?

A shared agreement of what certain sounds and symbols mean is necessary for human communication. None of the magical feats of human ingenuity that surround us: cars, planes, cell phones, even civilization itself couldn’t exist without rational language.

We literally cannot survive without language. The “forbidden experiment” of Frederick II consisted of raising infants without any language at all, in order to discover what “natural language” they would come up with. Instead, the children died.

Our dependence on language is an unsettling clue to something that is revealed in higher mystical states – all distinctions are a useful trick of ordinary consciousness.

Usefulness As The Clue

Consider this: to the hammer, wouldn’t everything look like a nail?

Isn’t it a bit convenient that the laws we cannot even conceive of breaking, logical laws, give power to our most cherished ability: complex communication?

After all, hasn’t the “reasoning” part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex which is so uniquely developed in humans, evolved in tight correlation with the development of our highly unique complex social pressures? Reason is dictated by language, and is consequently a condition of the ego.

Ego, language, and reason all rely on this fundamental distinction: there is a genuine difference between “me” and everything else in the world. The three are intimately linked.

We cannot even fathom that our precious tool isn’t useful everywhere, that reason is not all-powerful, that the universe could be essentially unintelligible to us anymore than we can imagine not existing.

Descartes made this clear, and so did Augustine before him: our sense of unique individuality is inescapable. We cannot rationally think “I don’t exist” – who else would be thinking that thought?

But the mystic doesn’t rationally think “I don’t exist”, she experiences it.

Reason as the Idol

“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.” – Salvador Dali

Now we see the true power of the egoic lens, it conditions everything we experience in ordinary awareness.

Human history suddenly appears like a great epic a single, conquering god. We have elevated reason to a god, quite literally made in our image. Every sentence and every thought affirm its divinity. We fashioned it with our own hands so long ago, far back in the mists of time, that we have forgotten how we made it.

The irony of the French Revolution is that the rage against the ancien régime inspired them to strip the churches and convert them to Temples of Reason, claiming victory over the gods once and for all. But, unwittingly, their mockery was identical to the thing they mocked: reason was no less of a god than the ones they destroyed – it was just the cleverest.

Yet, from the heights of Samadhi, far above thinkable thoughts, it’s an idol.

The revolutionaries and rationalists of today have no place for an experience which could reach beyond reason, like the paradoxes described by William James on nitrous oxide. What room is there in the Temple of Reason for such profound transcendence? James continues:

It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quality and quantity…and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life.

We can almost hear Aristotle rebuking James: A is not non-A! Dear is Aristotle, but dearer still is Truth.

It’s here, at the edge of reason, that spiritual traditions have taken up the challenge to carry the soul farther than the thinking mind ever could.

Buddist koans, for example, are inherently paradoxical questions, like riddles which don’t have an answer. The famous koan “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” is intentionally nonsensical.

Whatever you say, you won’t be wrong, but you won’t be right.

Can anything seem more pointless?

The point, however, is more than the answer. The point is to loosen the grip of the rational mind – the incessant problem-solving, problem-finding, mind that only feels safe in a rational world where, if A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C.

Meditating on koans is meant to subordinate the rational mind which always distinguishes me from them, and this from that. It is said that monks can experience “no mind” when meditating on koans, a state in which thinking completely ceases and pure experience is all that remains.

Koans are in every tradition, they just wear different masks.

Sitting at the very heart of Christianity might be the greatest Western koan of them all: the dogma of the Trinity. What else is the belief that God is simultaneously three and one than a step beyond the confines of rationality?

Despite the efforts of theologians to rationalize it, the mystery remains right there beyond the filter: one is three. Many preachers have fumbled over their words trying to describe the Trinity to a bewildered congregation.

It’s that same bewilderment the Zen masters were after. That’s the gate.

Like the shamans who used the darkest caves for their rituals, like the scryers who stared for hours at their crystal balls, like Buddhists and their “no-mind”, the Christian mysteries have the potential to detach us from ordinary perception which can only see the shades of reality visible through an egoic, rational lens.

The ancient practice of depicting therianthropes, or “human-animals”, appears in art dating back to more than 30,000 years ago, like the lion-man figurine shown above. This contradictory image may have been used to overcome the same mental obstacle as the religions above, reason. Specifically, the distinction between oneself and the animal or deity with whom the ancient wished to commune.

Butterfly Sails, Salvador Dali – Dali was part of the Surrealism movement, which encapsulated the possibility of an experience beyond rationality. It “started in 1917, and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes, sometimes with photographic precision, creating strange creatures from everyday objects, and developing painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was…to ‘resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality’, or surreality.” Wikipedia

Paradox and contradiction make it possible to move up and down the scale reality. They use language to overcome the very law which allows language to work at all: reason. Like the mythical Ouroboros, the words of the koans consume their own tails, and something entirely new springs to life. The alchemists called this “gold”. The Medieval philosophers called it a tertium quid (third thing).

Perhaps we could go far as to say that the existence of suffering is the highest koan of all – a mystery which, incidentally, is found at the root of all religions.

Religious traditions all across the world play with irrationality and contradiction. We have always reserved a place in our hearts for what we can’t fit into our heads. People have come into contact with the Beyond, the Eternal Now, through Buddha consciousness, in Christ, in the ecstatic dances of West Africa to the Shamanic psychedelic rituals of the Amazon.

They endure precisely because they offer something science could never discover on its own; irrationality can take us to places logic could never follow.

Everything is Nothing

The greatest spiritual teachings all converge somewhere beyond the horizon of reason, into mystical territory that can’t be approached with logic.

The ancient Heart Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism states:

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form / Emptiness is not separate from form, form is not separate from emptiness / Whatever is form is emptiness, whatever is emptiness is form

The 18-century master of Hasidic Jewish philosophy, Dov Ber of Mezeritch, said something similarly enigmatic:

One should think of one’s self as Ayin (nothingness), and that “absolute all” and “absolute nothingness” are the same, and that the person who learns to think about himself as Ayin will ascend to a spiritual world, where everything is the same and everything is equal: “life and death, ocean and dry land.”

Meister Eckhart, the famous medieval Christian Mystic, encouraged his followers to “breakthrough into the nothingness of the godhead”, for the soul “wants to penetrate to the simple ground of God, to the silent desert where not a trace of distinction is to be seen, neither Father nor Son nor Holy Spirit.”

And today, with the aid of psychedelic compounds, people are constantly breaking through to the same plane of awareness, where reason and its precious distinctions are nowhere to be found. The following is from a trip report I stumbled upon, perfectly echoing this mystical teaching:

I found myself floating in what I can only describe as an eternal, infinite void. In this ‘dimension’, there was no time, and no space. I forgot their meanings. I forgot my human senses, all of them. This perception was so direct and total, that it was beyond any sense; it was not visual, not tactile, not soniferous… It was everything at once and more. Unified, undefined, compressed. I forgot the life I had before. I forgot who or what I used to be. One thing only was certain: I was. I was this omnipotent flow of purity. When this realization popped out, it was so deep and clear, that I could only think ‘This is absolutely incredible.’, although it was a feeling rather than a thought. An obvious and undeniable feeling, a beam of unprocessed truth. Like opening my eyes to light for the first time. And discovering existence as what it truly is.

At the heights of mystical experience, even Existence and Nothingness merge into one. The all-powerful LNC is overcome, at long last. Language falls apart. The ego disintegrates. There is nothing for reason to grasp, to distinguish, to get its bearings. It is muien.

To the eye transfixed on true reality, “something” and “nothing” might as well be the same thing. Reality is so much greater than whatever we mean by the word “existence” that this word is as far away from describing true existence as the word “nothing”.

And this is the essential point: it’s not that existence and non-existence are objectively the same – we can’t so easily disarm the great Aristotle – it’s that we cannot even begin to grasp what existence objectively is outside the conditions of that egoic tool: language. So, whatever word we use for “being” is at best an approximation based entirely on what’s visible through our tiny key-hole in the “doors of perception.”

A nondual picture emerges. All boundaries are relative, even those we cannot even conceive of crossing. We are compelled to bow before the absurd: everything is nothing, All is ONE.

Conclusion

TLDR: Reason, as a tool for the survival of the ego, shields us from merging into the indescribable Void, the plenum…the All.

The frontiers of science in every age, and possibly in ours more than ever, show us how wrong our common sense understanding of reality truly is.

Donald Hoffman’s theory is appearing more and more likely: it’s not that we don’t yet have enough scientific facts to form a rational understanding of reality, it’s that a rational understanding of reality is inherently unattainable.

When we break through the confines of the ego, to the highest planes of consciousness, ordinary language is forced to say that this is that. A is non-A. And when we return, we find ourselves back at the foot of the Oracle at Delphi, dutifully obeying the injunction to “know thyself”. The simple fact that we have a “thyself” at all reveals exactly what kind of blinders we wear.

To intimately know how our personal, dualistic filter distorts reality is to have a light that illuminates the path of the deepest mysteries.