February
2017
Not
This, Not That by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD
Some years ago I was at a dance party when the night became increasingly
wild and the dancers all around me were going crazy, faster and faster. I
stopped. And then I began gently swaying picking the shape of phrases, not the
hammer of notes.
In recent times, with the lunacy of American politics and our own, with
the growing nuttiness of conspiracy theories, with the frantic anxieties of
every day living, I stop and start to reflect, apophatically, on the silences,
the absences, the cracks in the pavement.
So what is this this? Death,
perhaps, perhaps not.
I am drawn to the spaces between, to the bardos of life and death, and
to a creative presence that is being present in neither this, nor that.
I am trying to approach something that by its nature cannot be finally
approached, at least, perhaps, not yet. It is an intangible something. The 13th
century mystic, Meister Eckhart was intrigued by this “not this, not that”
something. He saw it as a problem of encountering the intangibility of God, for
as he said, “…therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God”. In other words, he wanted to strip
away from an encounter with the divine that was without preconception, without
idolatry. In some ways, he wanted to dance to the essence, or suchness, of God,
without giving way to some definition that obscures the nature of the divine,
including the very idea of a divinity.
Hinduism has a similar idea. In Sanskrit, the “not this, not that” is netti netti. There is a Vedic meditation
around this and it is an analytical one that is meant to set aside, and set
aside, and set aside ideas of Brahman, by beginning to understand what is not
Brahman. Such an approach is like Eckhart’s apophatic theology.
It is interesting that the via
negativa (the negative way) is an approach sometimes employed in research
in the sciences and humanities. When we intuit the presence of something that
is, as yet, intangible; something we feel the existence of, it is useful to
examine what is going on around the general area of that presence. Astronomers
use the technique often. They’ll theorize a presence, even an absence, like a
black hole, from the behaviour of heavenly bodies around it.
I am aware of my inner conversations regarding what seems to be a sort
of madness going around in our days. I seek the way of knowledge, logic and
rationality because this is how I have been trained as a thinker. I am,
however, intuiting some community shift, some groundswell that isn’t
identified. I hold at arms length short circuited explanations for things. I do
not buy into Nostradamus’ predictions, nor that of Mayan thought, nor new world
orders, nor anything that smacks of lizard minds. I am a skeptic and anyway I
rather like the tension of not knowing, for herein lies my creative spirit.
