For years I had not really understood what
Herakleitos meant when he said that “I explored myself…and I could not find the
boundaries [limits, peras] of the psyche…”. Of course not: the
open soul has no boundaries, no limits. It opens up into the unbounded, the
unlimited, and shares then in its unlimitedness. The open soul is not the
psyche of standard modern psychology, nor the “I” or ego of everyday life. It
is, rather, a conscious participation in the mystery of the Whole, of the
unbounded It-reality beyond all speech and name. When psyche opens, it
is no-thing; perhaps one can say, “not itself, but selfless.” To put the
experience paradoxically: when the soul opens, it is no longer a soul, at least
as long as the awareness of the experience lasts. Simple consciousness.
Of course there would be a danger of hypostasizing
the open psyche into “God” or “being,” or the Whole, but to do that may be a
mere playing with words, and it in effect would concretize the experienced
unbounded opening back into an imagined entity or being. In the opening of the
soul, there is neither “I” nor “You,” but simply consciousness: awareness
without names, things, activities. Unadorned, simple awareness. Perhaps this
is what William James called “pure consciousness.”
It may be fitting, as has been done, to call
Herakleitos and others—from Plato to William James, Bergson, Whitehead,
Voegelin—who experience consciousness in this way “mystic philosophers,” as has
been done (for example, by Whitehead and Voegelin). Or one could speak of the
opening of the soul that forms the experiential basis of philosophy as a mode of
self-transcendence, as a simple, noetic awareness of that which is. It is
noetic or knowing in the sense of an unthinking but intensely aware gazing of
the mind (nous, intellect). As consciousness (psyche) opens up,
noetic and logical processes of the mind differentiate. To think is to name
things and beings, and to reason (use logos) about them; noein
[noetic awareness] is simpler, more primary or basic, without words, and is,
perhaps, ever present beneath every act of thinking, but usually not recognized
as such. But this point remains for the time being an hypothesis to be
experimentally tested. It may be that in the act we call “thinking”
[legein, using logos], consciousness is not open as such, but
limiting itself in the act of thinking. If this is true, then one can
understand why a human being seeking to explore reality—what is—must move back
and forth between sheer openness and the self-limiting act of thinking. Perhaps
this back-and-forth process is described in Plato or Aristotle (I will give
thought to this possibility, which seems familiar to me, most likely from the
Phaedrus or the Symposium of Plato.) And if this is a
reasonable guess of what one experiences in thinking and knowing [noein],
then one might playfully change Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum (“I
think, therefore I am”) into “I think, therefore I am self-limited,” or more
paradoxically, “I think, therefore I am not.”
One is most truly oneself when one is not
self-enclosed, or a closed soul at all, but awake in the act of non-self-limited
consciousness. If this is a reasonable formulation of the truth of experience,
then one can recognize the common basis in philosophy, Buddhism (as in Zen) and
the mystics of various traditions. I, for one, have long been drawn to all
three of these human modes of experience (philosophy, Zen, mysticism), because I
have sensed in them a similarity not in formulations or mythical developments,
but in the engendering experience: open consciousness.
