Apophatic meditation provides a centering technique that has forever been connected in the Christian mystical tradition as "one-ing" oneself with God. It uses the process of negation to suppress preconceptions concerning God. There is no tradition of mysticism that holds that a self can perceive God directly. Instead, the self must eliminate what separates it from its source. In this case, any preconception concerning God would limit what God is and hence, be wrong or constructed from personal experience. Since God transcends this, so must we, at least if we are to one ourselves with God.
Once we one ourselves with God we enter a space which is a cloud of unknowing. With due deference to other cultural traditions, the Western tradition affords a special reverence for the un-space. What relevance this insight has beyond Western culture is hard to say. I feel that those who inherit the Bible for culture end up needing to work through these ideas in our own complicated ways. Some of us never resolve the issues. Some of us struggle in vain for some form of linguistic inoculation from a linguistic devil that invaded our psyche before we were born.
What is God? No-thing.
At the end of the day, you can be left with all the emptiness that implies, or a subtle sense of is-ness that survives in spite of all your negating. While this may constitute proof of absolutely nothing, some people find it calming. I do not. I can think of nothing more terrifying than nothing. And by that I mean, the ability to perceive nothing indefinitely without change. My mind immediately rejects this state. Ultimately, the best use of this form of meditation is that it helps me fall asleep at night.
What is a thing?
For the purposes of this argument, we can limit our understanding of the "thing" to any object that can be perceived. God is no-thing, because God can never be the object of perception. While this a very open definition of God, these are basic ontological assumptions we can make using observable data. We'll avoid moving beyond these bare bone assumptions.
The role of negation
The role of negation is to avoid getting stuck in the symbol or the preconception. They may be useful as focal points, but they end up limiting your understanding. Ultimately, these preconceptions must be unlearned, peeled away like a scab, or sometimes obliterated by psychic ballistics. It's important because once you have an image of God, you have made an object of God, which divides you from God. The repetitive suppression of the images hence prevents that.
Un-
You cannot see God. You cannot make God the object of your perception. You cannot know God. God will never tolerate being the direct object. That's God for you. I'm agnostic. I study these things because I'm interested in the individual's connection to concepts like God, and how entering an unconscious meditative space is equated to oneing yourself with God.
So, what is un-? For the purposes of this antiliterature space and the broader discourse of my poetics, the un- prefix will alternatively denote a process of reversing or something that stands under in the sense of being primordial. As an example, word:signal::language:unlanguage::conscious:unconscious. So, now we have a chain of analogies which establish a series of relationships that can readily be understood.
Paradox
Can this poetics be approached from the perspective of analytic philosophy? The answer is yes, and I've spent time reading articles by Willard Van Orman Quine and more on recursion, some linguistics, some math. Lot's of stuff. I think what I'm explaining here is important because there's a psychological element to it that is potentially beneficial.
What is paradox? How does it differ from a contradiction or an apparent contradiction? Why is paradox the next step?
Instead of answering that question, let us return to our two choices. God is no-thing (the cloud of unknowing). God is my preconception of God. Is that it? Nah.
Blake has an idea:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Essentially, the openness achieved through the apophatic meditation was open to Blake all the time. Whatever unconscious processes were triggered, he had access to them on command.
But there's no real evidence to suggest that Blake used an apophatic meditative approach or any meditative approach. It is interesting to note that there is another type of meditation called kataphatic that is the opposite of apophatic meditation. While apophatic meditating operates on a system of rejection, kataphatic meditation operates on a system of embrace and adornment using positive images to connect to God in positive space.
But what if you could do both at the same time? What would the steps look like? Logistically, you don't want to adorn and then wipe the slate clean because you'll end up with nothing predictably every time. The only order that makes sense is first clearing the mind, and then proceeding with an intentional adornment that isn't simply the projections of the psychic junk jumbled around in your brain.
The true paradoxes like Russell's paradox put you right there in that space forced to accept the seemingly opposite requirements as simultaneously true. But first you stain the water clean so the process isn't running automatically. Then, you start using your brain's projector to produce amazing poetry.
What you cannot do
God cannot be some things and not others. God is both the lamb and the tiger. God transcends your hopes and fears. That ultimately, is the issue with a kataphatic approach that does not consider via negativa. You end up stuck in the images. On the other hand, apophatic meditation is how I put myself to sleep. It seems ideally suited to that purpose. Further, Blake seemed able to separate the imaginative fictions his mind superimposed on reality from reality itself.
What is the role of the mystic?
The role of the mystic is to raise the perception of mankind to a higher level. Blake hoped his poetry would raise the perception of mankind to the infinite in all things. And it worked. There are now scientists working on theories that posit that from any given starting point, you should be able to deduce the entire physics of the universe given the correct framework. It turns out you can establish a mathematical basis for these ideas. These ideas have broad merit. Folks just take for granted how much can be said with so little. Sometimes, you can say more with less than you can with more.
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