Knowing The "Unknowable"

How many people do you know personally? (In your hometown? In the United States? In the world?)
Are you positive that you could count on each of them to react a certain way given a prescribed set of circumstances?
Is it really possible to know anyone intimately enough to accurately determine beyond any shadow of a doubt how they will respond in every situation?
If simply knowing or understanding a person is riddled with intricacies, what does this reveal about "knowing" GOD?

Joseph Campbell, widely recognized author and expert in comparative mythology, believed that all the religions of the world, including their deities, are simply masks veiling the same indescribable Truth which is “Unknowable".

In fact, if we explore some of the common denominators which exist at the core of every spiritual tradition, the incomprehensibleness of an Absolute, Infinite Being, which many call God, is at the very top of the list.

While Christianity reveals a more personal side to God as, "Our Heavenly Father," manifested in the nature of Jesus Christ, there are still numerous references in the New Testament of the Bible which indicate that God transcends mere knowledge.

“ O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!”- Rom 11:33
“To know the love of Christ which passes knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fulness of God.” - Eph 3:19
“If any man thinks he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know.” - 1Co 8:2

Medieval theologian, philosopher and mystic, Meister Eckhart, in referring to the classic writing, “The Cloud of Unknowing,” is quoted as saying:

“If one knows anything in God and affixes any name to it, that name is Not God. God is above names and above nature…….we should learn not to give God any name with the idea that we had thereby sufficiently honored and magnified Him: for God is above names and ineffable.”

If we explore the Judaic roots of Christianity, we may gain further insight from author of Jewish Mysticism, Rabbi David Cooper, who also references the Transcendent nature of God in his book, “God Is A Verb”:

“When we give a name to the Nameless it is a stumbling block that trips most people. We think that if it has a name, it has an identity. An identity comes with attributes. So we think we know something about it…... The word "God" suggests an embodiment of something that can be grasped. We have given a name to the Unknown and Unknowable and then have spent endless time trying to know it. We try because It has a name; but we must always fail because It is Unknowable.”

In an excerpt from Eastern Philosophy and Meditation we find this profound insight concurrently shared, and further clarified, by the teachings of professor of philosophy and Indian mystic Osho:

“Osho Rajneesh describes the world into 3 categories: The known, the unknown and the unknowable. The known is our present state of knowledge about the world through the scientific method and through logic and reasoning. The unknown is that which we do not know now but will find out in time. However, there is also the Unknowable. This is something that can be experienced but can never be made into an object of knowledge. Language, reasoning, logic and concepts are useless to either experience the unknowable or to communicate that experience to others. The Unknowable can be termed as God. God – or the Unknowable – cannot be made into the object of knowledge. But It can be experienced.”

This experience of “knowing,” or what some of the mystery schools refer to as “gnosis,” is not knowledge in the sense of learning or acquired information, but is indicative of knowing the “Unknowable” AS dynamic experiential Reality. This makes it impossible for God to ever be a mere object of intellectual knowledge.

Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi also makes a distinction between God's “Unknowable Essence” and his knowable attributes. He believed that all souls eventually coalesce into complete union with God's Essence, and therefore, that a mystical approach to the Divine attains to a greater degree than mere theological investigation, because it is a participation IN GOD, as opposed to simply knowledge about God.

Buddhism also refers to this “Unknowable Essence,” and it should be no surprise that the Buddha communicated this very same understanding. He would refuse to discuss any philosophical questions that came to him but instead would invite those asking to find out for themselves. By pointing to a direct experience of the Absolute, he encouraged his followers to traverse the inward path as he had, that all their questions about life, the universe, God and the Soul would be answered. The Buddha-Mind is also based upon this experience of the Unknowable which cannot be communicated, but is an understanding gained only through a direct realization of God or All That IS.

In his book, “A Life Divine,” Sri Aurobindo, Indian nationalist, philosopher and poet, eloquently expresses this experiential knowledge as communicated in the term Sachchidananda (Sat-Being-Consciousness, Chit-Mind-Existence, Ananda-Spirit-Bliss), or what he describes more succinctly as, “The Unknowable Knowing Itself.”

“The Unknowable Knowing Itself as Sachchidananda is the One Supreme affirmation of Vedanta; it contains all the others, or on it they depend. This is the one veritable ‘experience’ that remains when all appearances have been accounted for negatively by the elimination of their shapes and coverings, or positively by the reduction of their ‘names and forms’ to the constant Truth that they contain.”

The Apostle Paul affirms this Reality with his statement to the Corinthians when he says that the only aspect of our being which can truly know God is the Spirit of God in us and as us:

“For what man knows the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so, the things of God No One knows, but the Spirit of God. But we received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God; that we might know the things that were freely given to us OF God. Which things also we speak, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches, but which the Spirit teaches;”

To further clarify this statement, he goes on to say later in the same book that not only do we “have the mind of Christ (God),” but also, that “he that is joined unto the Lord IS One Spirit.” – 1Co 2:11-13 & 1Co 6:17

What many sincere seekers of Truth on the path to enlightenment and salvation have misunderstood is that with every experience of Truth there is an immediate reductionism that takes place from the Non-Dual to the relative expression, from that “Moment of Awareness” to the classification of that experience as something “known.” For in "Knowing God," once we try to place any experience in the category of the known in order to express, communicate or define it, it then becomes a memory of the past devoid of the dynamic life of Spirit. For even the most descriptive of attributes viewed through a chronological lens of separation can never adequately express this Vibrant, Perpetual, Present, Living Reality of Oneness which only comes by direct experience of Knowing the Unknowable.


*Full article by JSM (Joe Murawski) as it originally appeared on Columbus Spirituality Examiner