“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you- don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want- don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doors where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open- don’t go back to sleep”- Rumi

How does the infinite become finite? Can the Absolute ever be known? This is the great mystery. The conundrum that has faced those who have attempted to unravel it since, well… since forever.

Trying to grasp what is noumenal (the thing in itself) in the phenomenal (relative reality of duality) is quite a trick. I mean, we cannot know the Absolute with our mind because what we call knowledge comes from a mind that is limited by time and space.

What we know of the Absolute, where there is no time and space, then, is no longer the Absolute.

A God known by the mind is no more God for God is the Unknowable One and inexplicable.

The finite world is only a superimposition on the Absolute. Owing to ignorance we think the finite world is the only or truest reality. When the light of illumination (enlightenment) is brought to bear, the veil of illusion (termed Maya in Vedanta Philosophy) is removed and the knowledge of oneness dawns. The phenomenal, finite world disappears as an object of experience, and only the Absolute, noumenal exists.

The experience of the Absolute is possible only when all divergence disappears. It lies in the undifferentiated mass of the experiencer/knower, the experience/knowledge, and the experienced/object known.

So here is the conundrum, when we can no longer differentiate the knower from the knowledge and the object to be known, where is the knowledge and of what?

 Edited by Hayley Samuelson

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeri Senor admittedly has been trying to know the Absolute through her limited-in-time-and-space-mind for 52 years now. She has concluded that what she thought she ‘thunk’ needs to be ‘re-thunk’. Er… never mind, it’s complicated! Jeri can be reached at [email protected].