Essays on Spirituality by Jan F. Brouwer

Author:Jan F. Brouwer [Jan F. Brouwer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: spirituality, philosophy, enlightenment, psychology, religion
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17. the Dialectics of Emptiness

Both the world of Form and the world of Emptiness have no

beginning. If we do want to speak of any beginning (of time,

of Emptiness, of the world, of our own existence in its

metaphysical aspect), then we are right away confronted with

the paradox that such a beginning must have started outside

the space-time dimensions we know of, which is an

unsupportable absurdity to our reason. For it is absurd to

speak of a beginning, when there is no time. Time was born

with our knowledge of it –since it is one of a priori conditions

of the working of our consciousness- but before we became

conscious of time, we must logically already have been there,

and so was the world. Was there no time before we became

conscious of it? The question is absurd, for there is no use

speaking of time, when it has not yet been invented or

discovered (when knowledge of time has not yet become a

mental structure of our consciousness).

Just like space has no limits –it’s infinite- and causality has no first cause, so ‘objective time’ (if there were such a thing) is

without a beginning. The sentence of time did not start off

with a capital and will not end with a full stop. It is an ongoing process, a perpetuum mobile, full of change and diversity,

true, but without a beginning or an end. If there was a Bing

Bang, then there must have been something before it, causing

it to happen. And if there will be a Doomsday to hand out a

final blow to our world, then it will not be the last day in our

universe, for there is nothing to end all time. It is given by

consciousness, which is eternal both beyond and within the

time we know of.

This was already the insight of Parmenides, who was like all

Eleatics both a logician and a mystic: only Being is. It does

not make sense to speak of Non-Being but only in a figurative

sense, as a negation. For Non-Being contradicts itself in

asserting that it is not what it is. It will deny its own truth, if it denies its own Being. So when we speak of mystical

Emptiness, we will not describe it as a negative concept

(although it may be a negation in itself, viz. of the world of

Forms), but as positive and potential Being.

131

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.