We have established what the relationship between aporia and enlightenment is, and how it is formed. Let us now investigate how to move through it and experience an EES. We often conceive of the spiritual journey as an ascension upwards, but it is made clear in Zen, Tantra, and even some continental philosophy that this journey is fundamentally circular. At the end of it, you arrive where you began; you awaken to the fact that there is nothing to awaken to. I will present a series of extracts to make this esoteric claim more salient. Once it is plausible that all these traditions converge on this central truth, I will relate them back to the framework of aporia and enlightenment that I previously outlined. Beginning with Zen, D.T. Suzuki, famous for popularizing the tradition with the West, states the following in regards to realization:

“Before a man studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into truth, mountains to him are not mountains, and waters are not waters; but after he really attains the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are water.” (D.T. Suzuki, 1926, p.24)

The middle stage, when mountains are not mountains, is aporia. This is the Infinite Doubt that Dr. Newberg and Descartes experienced. Everything about the conventional world crumbles, there is no longer a ground for knowledge. The most salient example to be found in this tradition is in the 10 Bulls of Zen, a pictographic representation of enlightenment. The bull being taken as representing your mind. Each panel details a step on the path to enlightenment. In the eighth panel you transcend yourself, in the ninth you reach the source of all things. Yet in the tenth, you return to the world and live life as you once did. Having transcended duality, you come back and live even more deeply than before. “It is the state of ‘total flop’ or ‘old dog’. You subdue whatever needs to be subdued, and you care for whatever needs your care” (Trungpa, 1939, p.92). In fact, the very first panel of the set begins with, “The bull has never been lost. What need is there to search” (Reps, 1957, p.168). Turning to Tantric Buddhism, Chogyam Trungpa writes in great detail about the long, arduous and psychologically risky journey of a practitioner. He explains the evolution of ones being and the technicolor journey through reality that one takes, ending with the powerful statement:

“This is the end of the journey which need never have been made. This is the seamless web of what is” (Trungpa, 1939, p.72).

This journey is the navigation, mastery and transcendence of the aporetic state. My final example of convergence is taken from the studies into enlightenment mentioned earlier by Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman. A lifelong Catholic, devoted fully to God, was paradoxically asked by this God in a vision to give up her faith and religion. She was in anguish, her worldview turned on its head. Her incoherence and confusion can be characterized by a deep state of aporia. Yet she relinquished her faith, surrendered, and subsequently experienced a life-changing EES. SØren Kierkegaard wrote of this exact experience in his seminal work Fear And Trembling. He says, about his character the Knight of Faith, “He resigned everything infinitely and then grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd” (Kierkegaard, 1843, p.34). Both cases point to an aporetic paradox; in order to receive everything, they had to give it away first. In giving it all away, they shift their state of being, effortlessly, without clinging or grasping at anything. Herein lies the mystery: only in the moment they stop seeking, does realization occur. Not much can be said about this moment, but the instance before, the one of great surrender, is simply ceasing to cognitively engage with the infinite set of properties belonging to the concept of enlightenment. This leads to a great seeing, not understanding. Reality in all its glory, cannot be confined to the mind, which in Buddhism is only one of six senses. It is a full-body experience, which is why the spiritual sages of old are not called thinkers or knowers, but seers. In set-theoretic terms, one realizes that it is the empty set, not an infinite set, which belongs to the concept of enlightenment. This often occurs in a sudden flash, in an instant you experience a total psychological deconstruction, This moment of revelation comes without immediate cognitive effort, but only after having grappled deeply with aporia. Aporia is the crucible; aporia is the transformation to enlightenment. It is the rope one must climb on the journey from man to sage. It appears what you realize in the end is that you were already where you sought to be, but merely lacked the perspective to see it. You needed to be lost, confronted with infinite complexity to see the truth. But the crux is this, while the set was empty all along, it is still related to the infinite set. This relation, though based on misunderstanding, is not unreal in any sense. While the basis of aporia is indeed groundless, the experience of it is still manifestly real. In the Buddhist Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra it is said:

“Form is Emptiness, and Emptiness is Form” (Tsultrim, 1999, p.5).

These two seemingly contradictory words do not negate each other, but rather enable each other’s existence. The Buddhist concept of sunyata is not the substratum of objects, it is the precondition for their existence. Emptiness manifests itself through form. We can only see that objects lack inherent existence and are empty by analyzing them and showing that they contain no isolated essence and are interdependently originated. In a similar fashion, the only way in which an EES exists as an object to the mind is through aporia. As emptiness is demonstrated through form, the inconceivability of enlightenment is shown through aporia.