It seems to be a common desire when encountering a philosophical or religious system (or indeed when promoting one) to firstly understand it in a rational, systematised way. This is only natural. The very term ‘philosophical/religious system’ implies as much. Everything within our relative experience seems to be open to analysis and discursive thinking; in other words, to systematic understanding. Indeed, what seems to be a defining characteristic (although I wouldn’t push this too far) of the human condition is this intellectual capacity for systematic understanding. All the great benefits of science spring from this function. However, when we turn it towards ultimate questions, it hits it’s limits and a more holistic approach is required.
Previously I’ve mentioned these different functions or aspects of what we usually call our ‘mind’ or at least, consciousness. I mentioned them based on my understanding of one of my favourite western philosophers, Henri Bergson. I think there’s been neurological scientific work which would seem to provide some basis for this compartmentalizing approach, with different parts of the anatomy of the central nervous system and brain being linked to different activities- all under the broad rubric of ‘consciousness’. In any event, we don’t need to be neuroscientists to understand that our experience involves the functioning of variously directed bodily-and-mental senses, analytical intelligence representing one such sense or instrument.
The analytical intelligence is the instrument which grasps phenomena (both internal and external) in terms of their relations to each other, including the patterns of their composition, change and development and in frameworks of time and space (or relative position). This function of consciousness also provides the intellectual framework of our lives and life stories, interpersonal relationships, narratives, memories, plans etc-in cooperation with the other senses.
I’ve also mentioned that there seems to be a more immediate form of knowing which could be termed intuition, or pure perception, which is without the bifurcations and dualities of analytical thinking. This form knows things just as they are, in a unified field where subject and object have not yet separated or emerged.
Concepts concerning the ultimate nature of existence in terms such as monism, dualism, dialectical, and such corollary ones as immanence, transcendence, particular and universal, are coming out of analytical intelligence. They are applying strategies of this analytical function -which is suited to the relative- to that which is pointed at with the term ‘absolute’. In thus doing, they hit a brick wall so to speak.
They can map out the boundaries of limitation for the intellect, make some hints as to the ‘beyond’, but are really only the outer markers of that intellectual function which is suited for systematising the phenomena of relative experience- from within relative existence. That is why both apophatic mysticism and non-dualism tackle the problem in terms of negation; not this, not that, not one, not two (or many).