Heidegger, Infinity, and Prayer

Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that coming-over (Überkommen, overwhelming). Arrival means: to keep concealed in unconcealedness-to abide present in this keeping-to be a being. Being shows itself as the unconcealing overwhelming. Beings as such appear in the manner of the arrival that keeps itself concealed in unconcealedness. (The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics, Heidegger)

In my small class on creativity, always there is a strange mix of high school students who venture to take a course in college, or women in their fifties who raised their children and worked all their lives and now want to make sense of their life, in twilight of despair and disbelief and a dim hope that maybe life is more that this samsara of survival.  Mexican-American women in different professions, from business owners to housecleaners, and neglected and abused young men who are burning in self-mutilation and self-destruction to reach out to sky and the meaning of life.  I see in all of them that spark of divine that Levinas calls “height” (hauteur) which is infinite, and this is the presence of the ineffable God in each individual.  We pass most barriers and limitations, age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, cultural background and differences, and with those who survive the trip we enter into a strange journey into the Stalker’s Zone (Tarkovsky’s movie).   After four intensive weeks, 8-hours class per week, we zoom in and out and overlap our spirits in focus, and feel being seen and heard beyond any judgment, and our souls touch each other in the exultation that love is possible [1], and we fall in deep silent, on the threshold of the Room of Wishes. 

Then I tell them you have two minutes now; you are on the threshold, are you ready to step in?  But the Room of Wishes doesn’t give you what you wish consciously but what and who you are, your innermost desires, the one you suffered most for, the one that you swept under the rug, into dark side of your soul and unconscious, the one that you fashioned under cosmetics, the one that you should be audacious to see eye in eye, are you ready to step in that Room of Wishes and meet yourself?  And always and in all my classes, almost all my students say, no we are not ready!  And we meditate each session and write a creative piece and Bea wrote:

Week 4: A Bit of Introspection

            Breathe in and let the oxygen fill your lungs. Breathe out and feel carbon dioxide leave the body. Darkness pushing images up and down at the same time. Breathe in and feel your chest expand pulling in air and feel your lungs swelling with the energy around you. Breathe out and feel the release of negativity as it fuses with the air and flows away from your existence. Eyelids slowly descending and rising to meet only a sliver of light on the horizon. Breathe in. You no longer feel your lungs expand as the wave of introspective positivity crashes over you. Breathe out. You no longer feel the elastic push of contracting lungs as the relief of the world lifts from your shoulders. Blackness. Look into yourself. What do you see?

            Do you see colors splashing and writhing together harmoniously? Mixing and pulsing with your heartbeat, each expressing large, arching emotional strokes harsh and smooth through your consciousness. Or do you see long threads of letters crashing together as they form words, sentences, ideas, feelings, thoughts, then finally arriving at a whole consciousness? Do you see threads each a different color, a different wavelength, a different thickness, a different weight, a different texture, suspended indefinitely or in piles weaving and tangling together? Each thread tells a story; it is a different part of you. Their combination painting a picture of who you are and who you want to be.

            But who are you now? A survivor? A student? A teacher? A wounded spirit? A creative spirit? How do you connect to people? Do you look them in the eye and take time to listen to their struggles? Do you offer advice or hold out your shoulder? Our actions are a reflection of who we are now. Our words paint portraits of who we want to be. Our silence writes novels of who we used to be. The combination is our consciousness adjusted for the moment. But what makes us unique? What makes us the individual that we are? It is not our name. It is not our home address. It is not our outward appearance any more than it is our shoe size. These things are not what define us as the individual. So what makes us special? I cannot answer that for everyone. There is no one thing that makes us unique. It may be that the sum of our common parts and an indescribable force that makes us a unique whole.

 Who are you? Who am I? I do not know. I could not tell you; at least not in this short period of introspection. I am not a mental illness. I am not a hipster nor am I a square. I am not a genius. People are not black and white. People are beautiful shades of grey, of red, of orange, of yellow, of green, of blue, of purple, of colors we cannot even comprehend seeing. Each person is a unique blend of indescribable color, texture, shape, and size. A breath in. People are unique. They are indescribable, they are mixes of experiences and innate disposition. People are talented in different areas. I think I know who I am. A breath out. We are all unique. We all have different. We all express creativity differently. I doubt myself. A breath in. People are multifaceted. People are complex. I know my experiences. A breath out. I understand others. I do not know who I am. A breath in. I am not ready to face the room. A breath out. I will be someday.

Pressure and darkness lifting. Light rising on the horizon like the sun rotating positions with the moon. Suddenly light is filling your conscious displacing darkness and bringing calm. Color speckles your vision becoming increasingly defined with each nanosecond that passes. Green and brown congregate to porous and rough textures. The green becomes the grass you laid your head on and the leaves that provide loving protection above you. Brown becomes branches connecting leaves together to a central base. As your eyes continue to adjust you think about the people you know. The people who have touched your life and you wonder how many lives you’ve touched. How many unique individuals have you come to know? Breathe in and let the oxygen fill your lungs. Breathe out and feel carbon dioxide leave the body.”

Then I come from where I have been, I saw the mystery and it seems I can’t say it.  I feel the strange uplifting into ecstatic divine joy, pure, simple, unadulterated and undefiled with any authoritarian feature, desire to dominate, to look for short cuts, to do drugs or drink alcohol, clean like water, in soul and body, and my eyes are wet.  And when I let my defenses down, I see that everyone has it, if they let their defenses down, if they feel secure and not judged, but loved as they are, ready to change; everyone sees it, everyone feels it, the ineffable joy which defies definition or identity, and it is God, the Other, the Ontological Difference between Being and beings, as Heidegger puts it, in the Arrival of concealed in unconcealed Overwhelming, of that which gives under the veil and from the Merciful as such who remains ineffable.  [Overwhelming (Überkommnis) is the manner in which Being reaches beings. It preserves the meaning of sur-prise (over-taking) and thus of incalculability.  Arrival (Ankunft) is, so to speak, the "place" (in beings) in which Being arrives.] 

Despite the fact that Heidegger admits the essentiality of God in his fourfold: the sky, the earth, the mortals, and divinities, that God “deranges us”—in the sense that God calls us beyond the existing configuration of objects to see things that shine forth with a kind of holiness (i.e., a dignity and worth that exceeds our will), it seems he is not clear about the relation between Being and the divine. I will discuss that he emphasizes too much on finitude and doesn’t address the infinity (the divine) within human beings and the fact that the Being that withdraws in concealment in giving, is nothing but God as such. Heidegger believes the philosophers god as the grounding and self-grounding constitutes a metaphysics that is misleading, in that it turns God into a static state such as a “substance” or “subject”, while for him as well as for all religions in their original and mystical traditions, God is a loving ineffable verb, not noun.

In this brief reflection on Heidegger’s conception of Being and God, I will try to discuss the complexity of philosophical metaphysics as simple as possible, by focusing on the kernel of Heidegger’s inquiry on Ontological Difference, which basically means that Being as such is not the same as entities we encounter and exist in the world, there is a fundamental difference between them. I will ponder this Difference and compare it with traditional metaphysics according to Heidegger, Taylor, Caputo, and Peperzak, all from the anthology Religion After Metaphysics, edited by Mark A. Wrathall. Then, with Peperzak, I will focus on prayer as the locus of the lived experience of God, and will end this reflection with a prayer.

What Is the Problem with Traditional Metaphysics?
And What Is Ontological Difference?

Joan Stambaugh defines Onto-theo-logy in this way:

“Metaphysics is ontology (theory of Being) in that it thinks Being as the first and most universal ground common to all beings. Metaphysics is theology in that it thinks Being as the highest ground above all beings, ultimately as the ground of itself, causa sui, which is the metaphysical concept of God. Metaphysics is thus in its very nature onto-theo-logic.”

Now what is the problem with this way of seeing things?  Let’s use an example.  We see entities, this desk, that pen, this tree, that house, this person, that rock, do they have anything in common?  Don’t they?  We think they all are, whether it is alive or lifeless, a rock or an animal, everything IS.  This “is” is considered the most general concept under which all other concepts fall.  But is Being just a concept?  Is universal “tree” just a concept?  What is the relation between the concept of tree, and this tree, a willow tree, not any other tree?  How are they related?  Now what is the relation of Being (Isness as such) and all that is, each and every entity, beings?  We think all particular trees have common characteristics which justify us calling them “tree”.  We are inclined to think in biological terms.  To find the biological definition of tree, we have to find the definition of plant, and then autotrophic eukaryotes, unlike animals which have heterotrophic eukaryotes.  Autotroph means: “An organism capable of synthesizing its own food from inorganic substances, using light or chemical energy.  Green plants, algae, and certain bacteria are autotrophs.”

Pay attention to the words in this definition that we take for granted: organism, substances, and energy.  Now if you google the definition of these terms, you will arrive to a new series of abstractions for example for “substance”: physical matter, materials, distinct properties, the essential part of something.  And what does “essential” and “something” mean?  Essence: constituent elementary qualities which belong to any object or class of objects?  And what are “constituent quality” and “objects”?  Object: “That which is put, or which may be regarded as put, in the way of some of the senses; something visible or tangible.  Or: Object is a term for that about which the knowing subject is conversant.”

Pay attention that “substance”, “essence”, “object” are metaphysical notions.  They are not just empty words, they aim at certain things, but then “thing” also is a metaphysical notion which aim at “objects” or something else.  If one continues this chain of reductive definitions, one will arrive at the concept “Being”, which is basically the most general “thing” (?), or “quality” (?), or “substance” (?), or “subject” (?), or “name” (?). 

Nominalists say that these are just “names” and we use them to make sense of the world.  They see us as persons who have a mind and the mind has a representational capacity through naming or mental images, and by naming things and using sentences we form knowledge of the world.  So, it starts from a subject (a mind [?], a brain [?]) who moves from “inside” to “outside” and understands the world.  Is this not clear and self-evident?  Most of modern philosophers (Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Locke, Kant, and Hegel) and so many of contemporary philosophers think so.  One might wonder, is this way of looking at the world and persons, which is sometimes called ‘modern epistemology’ (theory of knowledge), not grounded in a distinct metaphysical system?  In Closed World Structures, Charles Taylor defines it in this way:

“Modern Epistemology: 1- knowing subjects as individuals; 2- taking in information through inner representations as in the older version mental pictures or as something like sentences held true in the more contemporary versions.” 

“Priority relations: Knowledge of the self and its states comes before knowledge of external reality and of others.  The knowledge of reality as neutral fact comes before our attributing to it various “values” and relevances.  And of course knowledge of the things of “this world,” of the natural order, precedes any theoretical invocation of forces and realities transcendent to it.”

Working within modern sciences, “priority relations tell us not only what is learned before what, but also what can be inferred on the basis of what.  There are foundational relations.  I know the world through my representations.  I must grasp the world as fact before I can posit values.  I must accede to the transcendent, if at all, by inference from the natural.  This can operate as a Closed World Structure, because it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the extreme and most fragile end of a series of inferences; it is the most epistemologically questionable.”  (RAM, p.50)

But is “representational thinking” not a Closed World Structure that can be questioned or compared with other Closed World Structures?  Consider these questions: do we know a linguistic term before or after understanding a language?  For example, can I use the sentence “this is a willow tree,” without knowing that it is a sentence in a language?  So, it seems I need to know a whole language before understanding this simple sentence.  And I need to understand a sentence before I understand a word, say “substance”, “essence”, “object” etc.  Can I, as an individual, understand the words I use to understand the world if there were no other individual?  After all language is a social phenomenon.  Children learn language by socialization with their parents and other people.  What about the world?  Do I understand the world by moving from “inside” me to “outside” me, or in order I understand what is “inside” me I have to understand also and coextensively what is “outside” me?  In so many cases I understand my “individual self” by being-in-the-world-with-other-people and they are not separable.  

But does this mean that there is nothing “inside” me that is unique to human beings?  The predicament of Closed World Structures is that they can't open up to each other, to experience multiplicity or coincentia oppositorum.  The "inner" and "outer" are coextensive, or with some compromise, in Heidegger's term: they are equiprimordial (Gleichursprünglich).  We don't move from inside to outside or from outside to inside, they come together, and all these Closed World Structures cancel out an essential part of what is to be a self: the infinite-divine-within-finite-being-in-the-world.  Now, let's look at another Closed World Structure.

Charles Taylor: Contestation of epistemological picture: (Heidegger and Merleau-ponty)

1)     Our grasp of the world does not consist simply of our holding inner representations of outer reality.  We hold such representations, which are perhaps best understood in contemporary terms as sentences held true but these only make the sense that they do for us because they are thrown up in the course of an ongoing activity of coping with the world by bodily, social, and cultural beings.  This coping can never be accounted for in terms of representations, but provide the background against which our representations have what they do;

2)    As just mentioned, this coping activity and the understanding which inhabits it, is not primarily that of each of us as individuals; rather, we are each inducted into the practices of coping as social “games” or activities; some of which do indeed, in the later stages of development, call upon us to assume a stance as individuals.  But primordially, we are part of social action;

3)    In this coping, we don’t deal with a world of objects, but as Heidegger puts in “pragmata” or referential totality that gives us relevance, meaning, significance, and intelligibility, not as add-on of objects, but objects find their meaning within referential whole.  Later, we learn to stand back, and consider things objectively, outside of the relevances of coping;

4)    In the later Heidegger, these significances include some which have a higher status, structuring our whole way of life, the ensemble of our significances.  In the formulation of “das Geviert,” [fourfold] there are four axes of our world in this more general sense: world and earth; human and divine.

5)    There is no priority of the neutral grasp of things over their value.  There is no priority of the individual’s sense of self over the society; our most primordial identity being inducted into an old game.  Even if we don’t add the fourth stage, and consider something like the divine as part of the inescapable context of human action, the whole sense that it comes as a remote and most fragile inference or additions in a long chain is totally undercut by this overturning of epistemology.  

 In this context, the word “Being” is not just the most general and empty word, it is ….what?  Now, from here whatever we say, we form different metaphysical systems.  Say, Being is the ground of all objects, it is the “substance” of all objects, and we are the “subject” against the world of “objects”.  These are different metaphysical expressions and most of the time reductive.  We reduce all the entities to some fundamental parts, say, atom, particles, energy, magnetic field.  Or we say Being is the ground of all beings.  Now, If I am idealist I would say Being and the whole world is represented to a subject like me, so everything including other people are in my mind and not really “outside”.  In this metaphysical system, such as in Hegel’s Absolute Idea, we see the “subject” as the ground of all beings.  Or if we are objectivist, we would see Being as the “substance” or “object” as the ground of all beings.  And this is another metaphysical system.  Heidegger calls this the “ontological” (a theory of Being) part of onto-theology of metaphysics.

Now, what is the “theological” part?  Heidegger believes when philosophy introduced God into its metaphysics, God became the ground of all beings as the first cause that even caused itself.  Da da…  the problem solved.  We know everything now.  We know what beings and entities are in the world.  They are grounded by Being.  And Being is grounded or caused by God, and God is caused by Itself.  Heidegger believes this version of metaphysics gives us a pretension of knowledge about the world and God, which is fallacious or misleading.  He says:

The insight into the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics shows a possible way to answer the question, "How does the deity enter into philosophy?" in terms of the essence of metaphysics. The deity enters into philosophy through the perdurance (Austrag is the carrying out of the "relation" of Being and beings, endured with an intensity that never lets up) of which we think at first as the approach to the active nature of the difference between Being and beings. The difference constitutes the ground plan in the structure of the essence of metaphysics. The perdurance results in and gives Being as the generative ground. This ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the causation through the supremely original matter-and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god. (Identity & Difference, p. 72)

Pay attention that Heidegger doesn’t say that we should abandon metaphysics altogether, because after all what he is saying about the difference between Being and beings (that I will discuss soon) is itself a poetic metaphysics different from onto-theo-logical metaphysics.  Second, he doesn’t reject God, on the contrary, he holds that we have to go back to revelations and connect with the ancient God, rather than a philosophical god.

Mark Wrathall explains it well:

Heidegger tells us that for a real thing [not entities as “resources” and “commodities”], a thing with existential importance, to show up, we must have practices for dealing with the earth and the sky, the divinities and our own mortality.  Real things themselves, in turn, will embody the way earth, sky, mortals, and divinities condition each other.  Heidegger’s name for the interrelation of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities is “the fourfold”…..To cite a couple of my favorite examples.  Heidegger tells us that the sky contributes to the essence of a jug as a jug-thing because the jug holds and pours out wine and thus gathers the sky.  The holding and pouring of the wine gathers the sky, he explains, because the grapes from which the wine is made “receive the rain and dew of the sky.”  As a second example, the Black Forest peasant’s farmhouse gathers the earth, he says, because it is placed on a “mountain slope… among the meadows close to the spring.”

Heidegger sees that these fourfold, the sky, the earth, mortals, and divinities, mirror each other.  He contends that God “deranges us”—in the sense that he calls us beyond the existing configuration of objects to see things that shine forth with a kind of holiness (i.e., a dignity and worth that exceeds our will).  Heidegger understands receptivity to the sacred as the experience of being beheld—of recognizing that there is a kind of intelligibility to the world that we do not ourselves produce.  If God is part of the fourfold, then he wrestles with each region of the four, and brings it into a sacred own-ness.

Wrathall continues:

If we, in turn, are receptive to God, our practices will embody a recognition that the technological reduction of objects to resources is an act of presumption, for it proceeds on the assumption that we are free to employ anything we encounter in any way whatsoever.  Once attuned by the divinities, technology will no longer be able to seduce us into an endless and empty “switching about ever anew,” because we will see certain things around us as invested with holiness—with an intelligibility inherent to them, which shines forth out of them.  So attuned, we may be able to establish what Heidegger calls a “free relation” to technology—a relation in which we are able to use technological devices to support our dwelling with things.  But because the draw of technology is so strong, it is only a God who can save us, as Heidegger once asserted.

After questioning the possibility of understanding of God metaphysically, Heidegger makes it somehow clear that we can’t “invent” divinities on our own.  We need to follow the divine revelation and listen and await God to instruct us, indeed through ancient revelations.  In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger states:

The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the Godhead.  Out of the holy sway of the Godhead, the God appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment.  When we speak of the divinities, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.

Also:

Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities.  In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for.  They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence.  They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols.  In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn. (Poetry, Language, Thought, p.150) 

Moreover, in “Conversations with a Buddhist Monk”, he states:

I consider only one thing to be decisive: to follow the words of the founder.  That alone—and neither the systems nor the doctrines and dogmas are important.  Religion is succession…Without the sacred we remain out of contact with the divinities.  Without being touched by the divinities, the experience of God fails to come. 

However, obviously he hasn’t experienced God for himself, to be guided to stay in faith resolutely.  He talks about withdrawal of God or absent of God at points.  Only one who hasn’t experienced God for oneself talks like this:

All we can do, Heidegger argues, is prepare ourselves for the advent in the hope that, through a gift of grace, we can receive our own revelation.  “I see the only possibility of a salvation in preparing a readiness, in thinking and poetizing, for the appearance of the God or for the absence of God in the case of decline; that we not, to put it coarsely, ‘come to a wretched end’, but rather if we decline, we decline in the face of the absent of God.”

But if one experiences God for oneself, or put it differently, if God guides one, then one realizes that God never was absent or will be absent; it is "I" who is the veil.  In The Experience of God, John Caputo talks about the phenomenological experience of the impossible (not as logical contradiction of possibility), but as “something phenomenological, namely that which shatters the horizon of expectation and foreseeability.  For if every experience occurs within a horizon of possibility, the experience of the impossible is the experience of shattering of this horizon. I am resisting all a priori logical and onto-theological constraints about the possible and the impossible in order to work my way back into the texture of the phenomenological structure of experience.” (Religion After Metaphysics, p.124)

Praying as an Experience of God

I already mentioned that Heidegger discusses why one can’t pray, sing, and dance before philosophers’ god, in onto-theo-logical metaphysics.  I will try to elaborate it a bit more. 

Heidegger’s objection to onto-theology is that they ground all beings in Being as if Being is standing on the side and then bring beings to the fore.  Onto-theology assumes that the Being of beings (the genitive) is the metaphysical substratum or subject, something which constantly and statically presents itself like an object.  Onto-theology leaves the mystery out and assumes it has shed complete light upon the ineffable.  What Heidegger tries to do is to show the difference between Being (which is not an entity) and beings (entities and human being as a distinct being or Dasein).  He problematizes “representational” expressions about the relation of Being and beings:

Thus we think of Being rigorously only when we think of it in its difference with beings, and of beings in their difference with Being. The difference thus comes specifically into view. If we try to form a representational idea of it, we will at once be misled into conceiving of difference as a relation which our representing has added to Being and to beings. Thus the difference is reduced to a distinction, something made up by our understanding (Verstand). But if we assume that the difference is a contribution made by our representational thinking, the question arises: a contribution to what? One answers: to beings. Good. But what does that mean: "beings"? What else could it mean than: something that is? Thus we give to the supposed contribution, the representational idea of difference, a place within Being. But "Being" itself says: Being

which is beings. Whenever we come to the place to which we were supposedly first bringing difference along as an alleged contribution, we always find that Being and beings in their difference are already there. It is as in Grimm's fairy tale The Hedgehog and the Hare: "I'm here already."

Heidegger believes onto-theological metaphysics has permeated language so deeply that it is difficult to bring the coincidentia oppositorum of the concealed-unconcealed (the present & absent; the same & difference) of Being and beings into formal language; so, he tries to express it through a poetic language.  He says that Being Overwhelms (unconcealing itself) beings in the Arrival (concealing) at beings.  He poetizes:

Being in the sense of unconcealing overwhelming, and beings as such in the sense of arrival that keeps itself concealed, are present, and thus differentiated, by virtue of the Same, the differentiation.  That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other. The difference of Being and beings, as the differentiation of overwhelming and arrival, is the perdurance (Austrag is the carrying out of the "relation" of Being and beings, endured with an intensity that never lets up.) of the two in unconcealing keeping in concealment. Within this perdurance there prevails a clearing of what veils and closes itself off-and this its prevalence bestows the being apart, and the being toward each other, of overwhelming and arrival. In our attempt to think of the difference as such, we do not make it disappear; rather, we follow it to its essential origin. On our way there we think of the perdurance of overwhelming and arrival. This is the matter of thinking, thought closer to rigorous thinking-closer by the distance of one step back: Being thought in terms of the difference.

Heidegger tries to show that Being is not an entity like any other being but each being is the "manner" of appearing of Being. The problem with our languages is that, according to Heidegger, our metaphysical solidification of "substance" and "subject" as Being, our very subject-predicate language, makes it almost impossible to understand Ontological Difference between Being and beings. Why? Because according to him Being withdraws into concealment in its very manner of arriving at and thus unconcealment in beings. And this is not easily sayable, or indeed it is ineffable.

This is the ineffable God, the Giver (the far and near, the immanent and transcendental) who is concealed in its unconcealment, that which one can experience but not “know”.  In Religion after Onto-theology, Peperzak actually objects to Heidegger intimations that all ancient metaphysicians sought to simplify the definition of God in causa sui (the grounding God), so as if to reveal the mystery of God.  He contends:

[T]he classics have not submitted God to the question: What is the ground of God?  On the contrary, all of them—and most clearly the Neoplatonists—have insisted on the abyss that separates all caused causes and connections, as integral parts of the universe or the Nous (spirit), from God as the One who cannot be caught by any categorical or conceptual grasp. (p.107).

Peperzak rightfully, I think, also criticizes Heidegger exaggeration that previous philosophers such as Spinoza and Descartes really took the idea that God is the cause or ground of God’s own being.  But to clarify what “godly” means, Peperzak focuses on prayer:

It seems to me that ‘prayer’, of which I venture here a clumsy description, can be recognized as a summary of religion by the faithful adherents of all religions, though, of course, its unfolding into communal traditions, practices, liturgies, laws, and beliefs shows many apparently irreconcilable differences…If my statement may be accepted not only as a ‘subjective’ impression but as a (hypo)thesis that deserves to be considered, we can simplify our problem by asking how the onto-theo-logical project can be related to the possibility and actuality of prayer…. We must ask ourselves why the God to whom Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Jesus prayed seems to be forgotten or even contradicted by “the God of the philosophers”.  According to an answer this question has often received, the God of the philosophers is not interested in human history or nature; he is not an inspiring, protecting, compassionate, creative and recreative, saving, and consoling presence.  Is he even a person?...Can we think an infinite person? If we can, this will not be enough to approach God, because God is not only the infinite Other: he/she/it is also that in which “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

In prayers we don’t reflect but surrender, on our knees, we meditate in the presence of God, in which like in air and light, we are floating.  There is no declaration of knowledge, but appeal, not intellectual certainty, but intense desire for and faith in the Merciful.  The metaphysical god as well as Heidegger’s divinities don’t see and declare the Day of Judgment, at least not explicitly.  In prayer, a believer learns to accept one’s eternal soul and the Day of Judgment, which is similar to Tarkovsky’s Room of Wishes in the Stalker, where one will meet one’s true self.  Are you ready?  Are you ready that now, which is too late to become a penitent and not a judge, as you will be judged, to enter the Room, where your own body will judge you[2]?  Prayer holds me closest to the Day of Judgment and as if I am on the threshold of the Divine Truth about what I have done and who I have become.  I pray on my knees to deliver me from my forgetfulness and ask God to help me not to have an ignominious exit from this world.  Heidegger speaks of the fourfold of the earth, sky, mortals, and divinities, but in prayer we feel and meet the fifth fold: the examination of our eternal soul, meeting God, the eternity as such.  Heidegger misses the fifth fold, the eternity in the mortal because he doesn’t appeal explicitly to revelations of God.  In Being and Time, splendidly he discerns the being of Dasein (human being) from objects (present-at-hand, Zuhandenheit) and equipment (ready-to-hand, Vorhandenheit), but, as Peperzak reminds us, he “remains within the orbit of the modern egology, according to which all beings are there (or given) to and for a center whose awareness encompasses all of them within the total but finite horizon of its universe.”  Strikingly, Heidegger never speaks of infinite.  But how can we talk about God and divinities without talking about infinite?  If Being is different than beings and nothing, it has to be infinite as God.  Peperzek refers to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, to posit prayer as a relation to God AND being-with-the-other:

Already in Totality and Infinity, Levinas appeals to Plato’s difference between ousia (being or essence) and to agathon (the Good) as names for the world of beings and God, respectively.  The Good, or God, is neither a being, nor an essence, nor being (ousia or einai) as such.  However, with regard to religion, Levinas’s main thesis holds that the relation to God (which I have named “prayer”) coincides with the relation to the other human person. (p.112)

Levinas uses the term “height” (hauteur) and “infinite” because we contact with God, “the Most High”, accordingly, in the presence of human Others.  Religion is charity.  However, I think believers can feel God constantly and specifically in prayers. When I was an atheist and didn’t believe that God even exists, of course prayer didn’t make sense to me.  It took years after my shattering experience of the divine, to establish the constant feeling of the presence of God and the most conspicuously in my prayers.  I can’t explain the phenomenology of the experience of prayer fully in this note.  All I can mention for now is that when I pray to God in concentration, I do feel ascendance to the origin, to the Day of Judgment, when I will meet God, and I can’t overcome this wish or desire to meet God in person on the earth in this life, because I feel God so close, and the change is in me, because God was and is always close to us.

Peperzak finishes his paper with this passage:

The most extensive and subtle discussions about the questions I have briefly indicated can be found in the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophies of the Middle Ages…Their reflection was supported and animated by a religious experience for which the mystery that caused their (onto-theo-)logical problems did not appear as impossible.  In their prayers, the otherness of God and their unity with the embracing quasi-totality of God’s presence—i.e., the identity of the infinite difference with the quasi-totality that separated them from and unified them with God—was quite appropriate to the only non-idolic God, although a formulation of this contradictory unity on the level of logic remained clumsy and inadequate.  What became obvious in lived devotion broke through the limits of their reflection, because their devotion reached farther than reflection.  The latter [reflection] is tempted by exaggeration and reduction: deism sticks to God’s otherness and separation, whereas pantheism exaggerates the identity without being bothered by the abyss.  Both have a partial conception of presence, while atheism prefers to stay within the walls of the finite totality. (p.120)

I finish this reflection note with a prayer of my own:

I pray to you God

In this moment of exaltation

When I can see we can fly

When my daughter becomes the spirit of eternity and floats in the divine

When my son steps out of the anxiety of identity and body and reconciles the opposites

Where the ideal has the meaning that you gave to our frail bodies—taghva, our God-consciousness.

I express my gratitude to you for all and all

The joy and the suffering, the pleasure and the pain, the sorrow and the happiness

I pray to you to purify my body and heart

To bring your light and peace to my soul

To give me power and time to compensate for my mistakes

I pray to you to guide us to the exuberance of your connection

--in this cold night of nihilism and atrocity.

I pray to you to forgive our self-blindness and cure us to see our limitations

And to resolve our dissonance and doubts

In reconciling the body with the truth of the infinite within us,

And overcoming the duality within

To say and to act, two
To think and to desire, two

To be and should be, two,

The conscious and unconscious, two

To become One so that to pass the threshold

And to step into the Room of Wishes.

       

---

[1] I just received the last reflection writing of my 17-years-old student in the summer 2016 intensive course on Creativity.  It brought tears to my eyes and warmed my heart:

Weekly Reflection

7/25/16

            For this last weekly reflection, I have a lot to talk about. But I wanted to focus about how reading the words of Socrates written by Plato have really given me a different outlook on a lot of matters. I found this reading to be extremely insightful. Reading it a few times, I thought I had the correct idea that the main message was pointing out how Socrates noted that he knew nothing and that he proved to a bunch of different craftsmen and tradesmen that they knew nothing in a sense that they were also ignorant. However, after the class that we had on Thursday, it was very clear that this was not the only ideas portrayed in the readings. It was astounding to think that he used a way to not necessarily critique people or call them out in a negative way, but you express a type of knowledge and wisdom that honestly was on a different level of thinking that I feel people couldn’t accept or try to change and adjust too.

            Sidetracking a bit, connecting this idea of non-contradicting yourself and being consistent that leads to logic and understanding yourself is a prime idea that I didn’t clearly see until it was explained on Thursday. As I was doing my apology exercise prior to the talk on Thursday I had this preconceived notion that Socrates was only trying to defend his reasoning behind the fact that he knows nothing and the people he questioned knows nothing. I only understood that part of it. I couldn’t fully comprehend how he incorporated this idea of creativity and how his words tied into Rogers, Jung, and Palmer.

            After the talk on Thursday I was able to get a clearer sense and better understanding of the words of Socrates. I was able to understand his creativity of him stepping outside of his comfort zone. Out of the safe zone that we all stay in. His ability to be called the wisest man and instead of spread that around, simply wonder and question if he could find anyone out in the marketplace that was smarter than him. The ability to not try to create the idea of logic, but just come about to creating it with the methods of asking people and finding out inconsistencies in their words as well as contradictory sentences. These are what I didn’t understand fully before and after was truly surprised and amazed of the huge beauty in this. Listening to you speak about how this 50-year time span that it took him to really understand, examine, ask, and find out about his life, and the lives of others and come to that realization that, “I really know nothing,” is simply beautiful. I was amazed at the tactic he used and unconsciously creatively mastered and created many different solutions.

            The fact that what he speaks about on examining ourselves and understanding that we don’t truly know everything is the same central theme we have been discussing in that we have to grow as a person and the first step to doing so is understanding and acknowledging ourselves to the fullest extent.

I walked into this class wondering what I would learn. Wondering if this class was worth it to drop and just give up. Wondering whether or not it was going to be interesting, boring, an easy A, all of that. I walked in with preconceived notions that this would just be a way to fill in my day with obligation and duty. But as I write this final reflection to this class, I realized I walked into something truly spectacular. Not in any class have I been more challenged, more motivated, and more accepting of myself, the class, and my peers. Not in any class have I been able to look back on the years I have taken and say, I truly got to know myself a whole ton. I was able to say that in this class.

            What I wanted to reflect about is the amazing journey I’ve taken. The steps from week 1 to week 6. The path that had me wondering if it was even worth it. I’m glad to say that I am happy I chose to stay. I’m extremely happy that I decided to push forward. At the end of it all, I loved the class. I was able to accept dark parts of me that I thought I could never explain. I was able to write about things that happened to me that I wasn’t necessarily proud of. I was able to accept that and turn my emotions and feelings into pieces of beautiful art and writing. From Socrates, Rogers, Jung, Palmer, Amy Tan, and all the Ted Talks we have watched, I honestly want to utilize all of these ideas and concepts and pass them on to my friends and other peers. I find these words of wisdom from all of these people to honestly be easy to relate to and honestly a great experience to hear about. To understand one’s darkness to be able to create and stay in the light is amazing.

            Overall, these 6 weeks have been extremely eye opening. I came in close-minded thinking that I wouldn’t have fun and wouldn’t enjoy the experience. I endured finding out more about my talents and my creativity and understanding parts of myself that was hard for me to accept. I even was able to write about it in a journal and relate to all the readings from Ueland and even to all the Ted Talks. It’s amazing to see what trying new things will do. Just like we have been told numerous times, “Just do it.” No matter what people may think of you doing something, as long as you tried to do it and you are able to say that you’ve experienced something amazing, then it will help you grow as a person. Even taking note of the experience by writing about it later on in the day helps.

            Truthfully, ending this class is a little heartbreaking to me, but they always say that when things end, it brings about new beginnings and I can honestly say this will be true. Taking in all this knowledge, I definitely without a doubt will be able to grow as an individual and utilize all this knowledge to better myself and help better those around me since I am the next generation that will be responsible to help do the earth good.

            I have learned nothing but positivity in this class and I’m ecstatic to be able to teach what I have learned to other people especially my younger brother. He will soon be exposed to the extreme judging in High School and the idea that society wants us to be a certain way especially during the teen years when people are constantly judging each other for what they have and what they own. I find this to be extremely sad and I can’t help but worry for my brother. I am anxious most of the time and I try to help instill him morals and values that will make him a good person and a stronger and better person.

            This class taught me growth in a sense that it not only mental but spiritual. Honestly I can’t believe that this class is coming to an end. These weeks went by so quickly and the next thing I knew, it was the last week. However, I enjoyed the video of the conference of the birds and the animation. I was so surprised to see that it related entirely to the central theme. This idea that we are scared of what we will encounter when we try things. The idea that we are afraid to know ourselves to seek ourselves and to be our true selves. The birds in the youtube presentation showed that lack of hope in becoming and understanding themselves but they were able to persevere and at the end it was a beautiful outcome. You got to see them each grow and take the trials and tribulations and surpass the negativity that was growing with every step towards finding the leader. Surprisingly, this was relating amazingly to Socrates, Jung, Rogers, and Palmer. I didn’t expect this to happen but it did and I was truly amazed that in different and various forms of creativity that we have experienced, the same message has been spread in a variety of forms. From videos, to interviews, to even simple written documents, I was able to see this central theme of the idea of creativity and the idea that we have to accept and acknowledge all of our experiences to hone and grow our creativity.

            Just ending this last reflection I would like to thank you ultimately for the experience and being the type of teacher to make us think rather than memorize and remember. This made the experience way better. It was a different style of teaching that makes the class enjoyable and really gave us a way to think hard on what we have learned and how we can apply this to our own lives.

[2] "Until, when they reach it, their hearing and their eyes and their skins will testify against them of what they used to do." (The Quran 41:20)