Beyond the Last Rung

Ludwig Wittgenstein published Tractatus  Logico-Philosophicus in 1922. It shook the world of philosophy, which was already in the middle of an intellectual earthquake with the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 and the General Theory of Relativity in 1915 and (as if that were not enough) the explosion of quantum theory that followed in the 1920s. After the dust had settled a bit at the corner of Academia Avenue and Intelligentsia Boulevard, the wise folks there began the task of writing a memo to the rest of us. A century later, unfortunately, the dust clouds are still swirling over the rest of us and large segments of the population, particularly those dominated by the "religions of the Book", have yet to get the memo -- or if they got it, they don't really get it.

But back to Tractatus. It's essentially seven propositions. The sixth one ends with Wittgenstein telling us that anyone who understands what he's saying will realize it is nonsense. They will use his words, he tells us, like a ladder -- to climb up beyond them. His seventh and last proposition consists of a single sentence, which in German reads, "Woven man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" and which C. K. Ogden translated into English as, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Now let's travel back in time 1300 years and gather in the Ta Fan Temple of Tang Dynasty China. Hui-neng, the Sixth Zen Patriarch, is reciting a verse he composed for those adherents of what he called the "Sudden School" of enlightenment. Let's listen to a few lines:

We should constantly set up the Light of Wisdom.

Erroneous views keep us in defilement

While right views remove us from it,

But when we are in a position to discard both of them

We are then absolutely pure,

Bodhi [Enlightenment] is immanent in our Essence of Mind [self-nature].

An attempt to look for it elsewhere is erroneous.

Within our impure mind the pure one is to be found ...

Right views are called 'transcendental';

Wrong views are called 'worldly'.

When all views, right or erroneous, are discarded

Then the essence of Bodhi appears.
 --[from the Sutra of Hui-neng, translated by Wong Mou-Lam, 1929]

I read the excerpt from Hui-neng before I read Tractatus and experienced something similar to a déjà vu moment when I read Wittgenstein's proposition seven.

In a sense, Hui-neng regards all views as being ultimately wrong. But let's not hastily conclude that we should discard all views right away. Not all views are equal. Some views lead us up beyond the words in which they are expressed -- Hui-neng calls these "transcendental" views. Other views lead us into more confusion. But even when our views point us towards the truth (the proverbial finger pointing to the moon), we must remember that words can never completely encompass the truth,

To completely encompass the truth, words would of necessity express literally "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The truth in this context is synonymous with the totality of what is real. The totality of what is real is the whole universe -- or the whole multiverse, if there is more than one. So we are trying to use words to encompass what is all-encompassing. Words convey information about things by distinguishing what a thing is from what it is not, but something that encompasses everything leaves us with nothing to be distinguished from.

This all-encompassing reality is not an abstraction. It's what we mean when we speak of  "this present moment" or the "realness" of whatever we are experiencing right now. or when we speak of "consciousness-itself" or "awareness-itself."

There's an ancient Zen saying that the truth is like sweetness. There's no way to say what it is. But the moment you taste it, you know. So how do we taste the truth?  We fall awake, my friends. We pay attention.