Episode 217 - Transcript

So I always get emails after an episode’s released, but after last episode, there was a notable increase in two specific kinds of emails I get. One was an increase in the number of people saying the episode led to them having a pretty deep shift in the ways that they are thinking about things. That Keiji Nishitani is opening them up to a whole new interesting way of exploring what it is to exist.

The other was an increase in the number of people saying they don’t quite get it. That while they appreciate it and are sticking with it, it’s such a different way of thinking that it’s difficult to wrap my mind around what’s truly being said here.

Felt the need to just acknowledge this before we talk about Nishitani’s views on religion today.

I mean I know I must sound like a broken record lately: be sure to listen to every episode from 211 up to this one if you want to understand what’s being talked about.

But look, it’s not like I’m trying to annoy you or be overly complicated. It’s just a gift I have. No, but there are episodes of this podcast where we’re doing something different: some episodes are trying to cover things a little more broadly across a thinker’s entire work. It casts a wide net. That’s some of the episodes we do.

But those are always going to be episodes that can never hit you as hard as when we talk about more of the context of where a thinker’s coming from, their influences, the deeper conversations they were embedded in.

I mean just for example: you know it’s been said by some Buddhists before that look, you can explain all of Buddhism to someone in just three sentences. You can say: Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness. The two are not separate.

And you can imagine someone hearing it and saying oh yeah, well I guess I get it then. I mean I understand those sentences in the English language, so I guess I now understand all of Buddhism, don’t I?

But you can also imagine this person thinking that they get it, but not quite getting it. You can imagine that those three sentences, when understood at a deeper level with a bit more context, have the ability to not just sound really nice to you, but to maybe change you at a deep level.

And short of apologizing for going a bit deeper into this stuff, for building from episode to episode to take these ideas into deeper waters, I’m hoping there’s enough of you out there that are still enjoying this exploration into the limits of dualistic thinking, of trying to access this more immediate connection with being. From the tragic perspective to Heidegger to the Mystics to Nishitani, they’re all talking about something here that is overlapping… well, what is it? And is it a mistake to think of this something they’re talking about as a single thing?

Well let’s get more into it today, and to pick up where we left off last time: Sunyata is going to be a crucial piece of this for Keiji Nishitani, with Sunyata’s relationship to religion being at center stage this episode.

And you know it’s funny: God is dead is a statement that most people listening to this would recognize, I think. It’s an infamous statement by one of Nishitani’s big influences in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

And when you hear God is dead, it can sound, even when you understand Nietzsche’s deeper point that he’s making with it, that the meaning of that statement is something that’s hostile towards religion. That it must be saying that religion is dead or is a thing of the past in some way, but as we’ll see by the end of this episode, the statement God is dead, through the eyes of someone like Keiji Nishitani, is not an anti-religious statement at all. In fact to him it’s actually a foreshadowing to what you could call a golden age of religious participation that may come about in the near future. Again, it’ll make more sense by the end of this episode.

And the way we get there is to talk about religion along the same lines that we talked about Nihilism last episode. Meaning, to Nishitani, it’s a mistake to only consider a piece of what something is to people, and then pretend to understand the essence of the thing in its entirety.

We talked about how it’s possible to have a shallow relationship with Nihilism and Death, and how it’s possible to experience these things more deeply if you examine the ways that people usually frame them in an incomplete way.

Well what would happen if we did this same thing when it comes to religion?

For the sake of covering as many sides of this as we can on this episode, let’s start with what an atheist might say about religion in the kind of world we live in. Similar to the Nihilist from last time that sees Nihilism as a problem to be solved, this person might think of religion as something that’s mostly just a security blanket for people.

That religion is obviously a sociological construct, designed to not only control people, but to give people easy answers to difficult questions in a complicated universe. Things like morality for a religious person, under this view, aren’t difficult problems—just listen to what God has to say about it and then it’s objective and easy. More than that: who you are isn’t a complex or difficult thing—just read the book of Job or Matthew and it’ll more or less tell you who you are. In other words, religion, it’s said by some, is a type of mythology that simplifies reality down for scared, weak people that either are too busy to or unwilling to affirm reality in all of its complexity. These people have to deny big pieces of reality, so they turn to religion to be able to do it.

Now contrast this with somebody that’s maybe a bit more favorable towards religion. Since I said the book of Matthew, let’s stick to modern Christianity as an example. And by the way, this isn’t me trying to exclude other religions. It’s just the one I’m most familiar with myself, to be able to make Nishitani’s point here without speaking out of my lane too much.

So anyway, you talk to an average Christian going to church on Sunday, you ask them what religion is, and they might say something like, well, religion for me is the path to personal salvation. I was born in sin, I believe in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and through the sacrifice of God’s one and only son, I am absolved of my mistakes and earn admittance into the kingdom of heaven.

Now both of these to Nishitani probably cover a piece of what religion is to some people.

I mean first of all, no doubt some people do use religion as a security blanket, and I think he’d say that’s probably something you see more commonly in the western world, where this opinion is very popular just given the type of religion that’s prevalent.

And no doubt to some people, religion is most experienced by them as the one and only ticket they have to salvation.

But both of these, while they’re not wrong, to Nishitani you could say they are incomplete when it comes to describing a full picture of what religion is. These both would only be covering a piece of it.

So in his book Religion and Nothingness, Nishitani starts out by giving a few, slightly more sophisticated takes on what religion is that are popular among scholars. And just like with Nihilism, these common takes are going to be important for us to consider if we want to understand religion more fully—that is, if we want to understand what’s missing from these definitions.

He says one popular way people in the west will describe religion is that it's the relationship of man to an absolute, like God, for example. That’s one way of distilling religion down if you wanted to.

Another one is they’ll describe religion as simply the process of getting ever closer to an idea of the Holy. That’s another distillation.

Nishitani says some scholars describe religion as the abandonment of self-will in order to live according to the will of God. Some other thinkers have framed it as the intuition of the infinite found in the finite.

Now all of these attempts at a description—from the atheist, the believer, all the way down to the scholars—are incomplete if you’re Nishitani. In fact, if you were to examine them all and try to find something similar about them, Nishitani says notice something here that his colleague Martin Heidegger may have pointed out about the modern western world and the way that we typically think about things.

These are all attempts to describe what religion is by framing it in terms of its utilitarian function, or in terms of what use it serves a particular person or to a society.

This is what we do with everything in the western world. You ask someone what something is, and it's as if by default they’ll respond with what use it serves to them.

We’ll say something like art is a way for you to express your emotions, or to liven up a room. Education, we’ll say, is a tool to prepare people for the workforce, or a friend is someone who’s there for you when you’re having a bad day. We frame things in terms of their utility.

And remember Heidegger would say that this is a symptom of the technological framing we give to everything, and that while framing it in this way certainly helps us in specific areas like the sciences and technology, and while it’s very important, it also has consequences when it’s the only way you see things. It blocks your ability to see deeper levels of the world when it comes to other stuff.

Well, religion is going to be one of those other stuffs, to Nishitani.

And just like on last episode, where Nihilism was something we’re viewing too narrowly because in the west we were trying to view it totally from the outside, religion is also something Nishitani thinks that we can’t possibly get a full picture of again if we’re only looking at it from the outside. Defining it by its utility. Defining it by its similarities or differences to other things.

What he’s saying is that religion, in some other very important sense, is something that can only be known in the subjective experience of the person that’s immersed in a religious quest. In other words, it’s from the inside of a religious quest that an important vantage point becomes clear to us about religion and what it is.

Now obvious first question you may have is: what is a religious quest? Well to Nishitani, while there are many different ways that a religious quest can play out in terms of the specifics in someone’s life, there is a general movement you could expect to see going on in the internal experience of someone that’s on a truly religious quest, and that is: a reformulation of the self and its whole relationship to its reality.

To put it way too densely here at first (but then I’ll obviously go back and explain more of the context of what he means throughout the episode): a truly religious quest, to Nishitani, is one where a person moves from a dualistic, utilitarian framing of the world where the individual self is always the center lens that you see everything through, to one where the self is more emptied. Where, to Nishitani, by emptying the self we then liberate the self from the illusion of separation, where then, from this new liberated standpoint, the further religious quest is to discover our place within the interdependent network of being, where by truly affirming reality, at this level, we then realize that this network is something we are always, already in a meaningful relationship with.

A religious quest truly begins then, for Nishitani, and he says this in the first chapter of the book, when you stop framing religion and the world around you in terms of “what use does this serve to me?” and start framing it in terms of “for what purpose do I exist?”

That shift in your thinking is going to be a critical piece of what he would call any truly religious transformation.

Now don’t be deceived here. You may hear that and think, well, that’s what I’m already doing. In fact, that’s what I’ve been doing in church since I was about eight years old. I’m always asking for what larger purpose I exist.

But just as your philosophical sherpa here, I have to advise you: you’re probably not doing this at the level that Nishitani’s talking about. Most people that call themselves religious are not doing this.

Because just like most people have a pretty shallow relationship with Nihilism or Death, like we talked about last time, most people have a pretty shallow relationship with religion to Keiji Nishitani. The same way you can be a goth kid that wears all black, talks about death all day long, but still not be facing death very seriously, you can be a person that sees religion as a cornerstone of how you live your life, but never actually experience any real religious transformation.

I mean, again, to stay in my lane here with what I know to try to make Nishitani’s point the best I can, I might be someone who looks around me at the mostly Christians in the United States where I live, and I could say, look, I’ve been to quite a few church services in my day, and the people at these services are not generally people that are, you know, emptying the self, affirming the complexity of the interdependent network that they’re a part of. No, these are generally people eating cookies and talking about the football game that’s going to be on later.

In other words, what’s going on at these church services for a lot of people is not anything transformative. Far from this being a weekly exercise in rethinking the self and the ego and its relationship with the world, for a lot of people, this becomes an emboldening of the self and the ego. A reinforcement of the grasp they have over the objective moral truth of the universe. It becomes something they wield around in conversations as an authoritative stance that ends up shutting down any further discussion about complexity.

Now, as a religious person, you may hear that and be like, well, that’s a little unfair. I mean, let’s say I do use it in that way sometimes. Look, I’m being serious: I do also sit in the pews of my church when a service is going on, and I do feel a sense of humility. Going to church does make me a little less self-centered and a little more in line with my role in a larger plan that’s being carried out. And what, is that not religion? Does that count for nothing if you’re Nishitani?

To Nishitani, it doesn’t count for nothing. But to Nishitani, if we’re being honest, it is a pretty shallow experience of the kind of transformation that something like religion has a unique capacity to provide for people. Think of how special of a domain religion is, as something that can lead to spiritual development if taken actually seriously. Think of the mystics we talked about a couple episodes ago and their experiences, a lifetime of devotion, daily focused practice towards a deeper and deeper communion with God and their own being. Think about Heidegger’s point about how the theoretical, scientific abstractions that we usually live our lives in are secondary, and how there is a more immediate connection with being that is possible. Think of Nishitani’s work on Nihilism just from last episode.

Religious language and devotional practice, when taken seriously, seem to have a unique ability to transform people in this area. There’s a unique level of guidance that’s possible at the higher levels of these religious communities. Shouldn’t we be respecting that fact if it’s true?

And look, if we want to understand his larger point here today, I get in our cult of egalitarianism that we always want to be able to say that everybody’s experience is equally valid, equally deep, but look, we have to be able to mark a distinction here between people that take their religion seriously as a devotional practice and people that are just showing up on Sundays to avoid judgment from the family or because religion has some use to them and their eternal fate. There’s a difference between Meister Eckhart and Mister Kowalski from down the street.

What percentage of people do you really think take their religion seriously to the point that it transforms them? And what percentage of people are using it at this point in their lives more or less like a self-help book, or as Nishitani might see it: like yet another ego-centric way of projecting themselves onto the world so they can have mastery over it?

Now before we get more into what Nishitani thinks a religious quest looks like, let’s clear a couple things up around using the word religion here to describe this transformation he’s talking about.

What I mean is, okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say barely anybody is taking their religion seriously, just statistically in the modern world. Well then why does Nishitani need to use the word religion here at all? Religion, as a word, carries with it so much baggage—he must realize that. I mean, if most people who think of themselves as religious are not authentically religious, then why not just call them the religious people, and whatever small percentage of people are actually engaging with religion, why not call them, I don’t know, contemplatives or something. Seems like both an atheist and a religious person could argue this same point for different reasons.

Well, because this would distract from how unique of a path religion is in all of its varying forms, as a gateway to this specific kind of relationship to being. Just as a comparison, think of the way we use the term university when people go off to school. What is most people’s experience going to a university? It’s not studying all day long. It’s not a devotional practice. Most people go to college because society tells them if they do, then they’ll get credentialed, and they’ll get hired in a field they want to work in. It’s essentially personal salvation for the career world. I’m just doing it for the certificate on the wall so I can make more money.

And they’ll do the assignments; they’ll study for the test at the end of the week, but if you came to most people ten years later, how much of this stuff they’re learning are they really going to be able to remember for you?

However, you could make an argument that there is a very small percentage of people that apply themselves deeply when they go to a university, and that those people are uniquely capable, when they’re in a university setting, of becoming part of something bigger than themselves, part of an intellectual tradition, someone that can be a torchbearer heading into the future for whatever field they’re a part of.

University, then, seen from one angle, can be almost a complete waste of money; seen from another angle, it’s one of the only places with the resources to produce someone with a very particular, highly desirable skillset. It’s a transformative experience, in other words.

Well, so too, Nishitani thinks, with religion and religious practice. And it would be silly for us to not use the word religion, call people contemplatives or something, simply because of the shallow way religion’s often utilized by people of this particular culture and time.

I mean, real question: is religion the thing that is shallow, or are the people shallow? Do most people just usually experience religion in a dulled and appropriated way? More than that, what are these different religions all doing? Is everything from Buddhism to Hinduism to Christianity, Islam, Judaism—are these all different attempts to just give people a security blanket? To control people? Like when these were created, was there a council of people that sat around saying, hey, let’s find a way to control all the people with a scary story about the creator of the universe? Quick, Fred, write that idea down, that’s a good one.

No, for Nishitani, the origins of these traditions lied in the stories of individuals, individuals who were exploring their own experience of being at an extremely deep level, and these people, in whatever tradition they existed in, encountered nihilism in a unique way at the bottom of their search, then they discovered some kind of purpose or connection to something greater, and then they formulated a way to live authentically on the other side of this insight. I mean, these are typically the kinds of stories we find at the origins of these religions that we know today.

In other words, these weren’t politicians that were trying to control people; these were individuals who, in their existential experience of the world, moved from asking questions like what use do these things in the world have for me and my own ego-driven agenda, and they started asking questions like: for what purpose do I exist in this larger network?

Now whatever dulled and appropriated form this may take in the lives of billions of people in the modern world is beside the point. Yeah, practically everybody is distracting themselves with one ego-driven agenda or another—their own career, their political beliefs, their TV shows, fantasies, drugs—and yes, they do it with what we often call “religion” as well. These shallow forms of religion become something people just project onto the world so they can control it.

But to Nishitani, this is transparently a way to avoid a truly religious engagement with the world. If a religious quest requires us to reformulate the self and its relationship to reality, seeing through this illusion of separation from reality, then distracting yourself from nihilism and nihilistic questions examining the foundations of meaning becomes an anti-religious exercise, whatever it is.

So ironically, the mass-produced versions of these religious approaches end up becoming things that allow people to ask religious questions less frequently to Nishitani—religion ends up blocking religious engagement.

This is where most people in the western world have existed for thousands of years to him—primarily in the realm of consciousness, as he puts it.

Let me explain what he means by consciousness… let’s slow down, and let’s talk about what he thinks is missing from our understanding of religion and religious quests.

There’s terminology Nishitani introduces in the book that can help us organize all this a bit better.

Think of there being three different experiential fields of awareness that we have, three existential standpoints that you could use as a model to understand your experience of the world if you wanted to. Three of them. One is consciousness, two is nihility, and three is sunyata. And understanding the movement we go through internally between these three different fields of awareness will help us understand what he sees as an authentic religious quest.

And to put it briefly, the religious quest is generally going to be a movement from the consciousness field of awareness, through the field of nihility, to a deeper connection to the field of sunyata, removing the illusion of our separation from being—some people may say God here. But anyway, notice how the general structure of this quest might resemble some of the religious quests you’re familiar with that have been presented as examples in the popular religions.

So we’ll get into all of it. Let’s start with number one, though. Consciousness, to Nishitani, is the field of awareness where most of us usually spend almost every second of our lives. It’s the one I’m talking about when I say we project ourselves onto the world and try to control it. It’s the one I’m talking about when I say we always are thinking in dualistic, utilitarian ways.

Consciousness is the field of awareness, to Nishitani, that is representational, meaning it’s the kind of awareness where there’s always an individual subject, or a you, and you’re always looking for how you relate to objects that you then try to control.

Or objects that we “reify,” in the words of Nishitani. And what he means is, we’re always trying to turn these objects that really have no fixed, durable meaning into something that is fixed and durable, something we can manipulate for our own agendas.

And in order to reify them in this way, we have to smuggle in things like Platonic forms in the west. We smuggle in the idea of there being essences to things. We smuggle in meaning as it’s supposedly ordained to us by some external god. All this goes on at the level of consciousness if you’re Nishitani, and you can see the similarities here to the work of his colleague Martin Heidegger.

Consciousness, then, is the field of our awareness where we create these elaborate theories about how subjects relate to objects for the sake of utility. And it’s also the field of our awareness that keeps us in a constant state of distraction from these deeper religious questions. Again, if you’re not engaging with nihilism at a deep enough level, then you will always be living in this field of consciousness, a place of theoretical abstractions, which means you will always be living at a distance from the more immediate connection we have to being.

So, like I said before, this is the place that most people live their lives in all the time. Life for many people becomes just a matter of finding yet another way to project your ego onto the world.

And it should be said: basically all of western philosophy, Nishitani says, goes on solely in this field of consciousness. In fact, if you look back at the history of western thought, you’ll see that thinkers have mostly ignored these other two fields of nihility and sunyata.

We’ll touch on these a bit more here in a second, but real quick: don’t get him wrong when it comes to his thoughts about western philosophy—western philosophy, he would say, has done a lot of impressive and useful stuff in this field of consciousness over the years.

Incredible systems have been created connecting subjects and objects together in truly productive ways.

Again, we should avoid the possible mistake here of dualistic thinking, where you might assume that what Nishitani must be saying is that we gotta get rid of consciousness, it needs to go, and we need to fix it with some better way of thinking.

No, he acknowledges we need to live in consciousness sometimes.

What he’s saying is something more along the lines of: to only spend your life with an awareness of this realm of consciousness, and to ignore the other two, would put you in a place where you’re always projecting yourself, or your ego, onto the world and trying to control it in some way.

Now someone like Nietzsche would say that this is a feature and not a bug of consciousness. We need to create values via the self, he thinks, and thank God we can, that’s the only way values are created at all.

And remember the common criticism that came up about Nietzsche’s work when we were talking about it: that it places too much emphasis on one scale of reality, the individual, and not enough emphasis on the other scales of being that we always are occupying.

Well, here is Nishitani not just affirming reality at the scale of the individual like Nietzsche, but he’s trying to affirm it at every other scale of reality as well. Here is him saying that truly religious transformation is going to be to take this individual self from the field of consciousness and to liberate it, to understand the groundless ground that what we call the self ultimately rests upon, and to expand our ability to see our connection to the vast network of being that we’re a part of.

Now really quick, keep in mind what this is not saying. It is not saying that we should get rid of the self.

This is not nullifying the self, but it’s also moving away from us reifying the self. See, this is typically how dualistic thinking will work: we think we need to either reify the self and make it into something way more important and durable than it actually is, kind of like what we do with forms and objects when we reify them, or if it’s not that, then we need to nullify the self and get rid of it entirely, say something like the self is a total illusion.

But no, neither of these are what Nishitani is saying. Again, there is no fixed essence to what this self we’re talking about is. Like the point we arrived at towards the end of last episode: the thing that makes the self what it is, is the emptiness of sunyata.

So the only way to see that emptiness is to empty the self, to empty it as much as we can of all these artifacts from the field of consciousness, where we’re creating these elaborate systems that block us from a deeper connection to nihility and sunyata. The idea is we need to empty the self if we want to liberate the self.

Now how exactly would this look in practice? Seems like a couple examples might be helpful for us to have here.

And we’ve already talked on this podcast a bit ago about the work of the philosopher Simone Weil and her concept of attention. Well, Simone Weil is going to be someone whose work is directly related to this whole conversation we’ve been having lately.

And to use one of her examples, and to make this relatable, to just use an example of self-emptying that goes on at the level of a person talking to another person, Simone Weil writes about how when you come across someone, anyone, and start having a conversation with them, there are different standpoints that you can be having that conversation from.

On one hand, you can be talking to someone, and if you’re operating in this field of consciousness that Nishitani’s talking about, you might have the entire conversation with this person filtering all of it through what use this person has to you. How does this person benefit my own projects or agendas? How is what they’re saying here similar to what I already believe in? You may only consider differences in the ways that they view the world insofar as they are commensurate with your ways that you view things. In other words, there’s a way to have every conversation you ever find yourself in from a dualistic, utilitarian framing, where you’re ultimately just projecting yourself onto this other person.

But then there’s another way to orient yourself towards this whole process. You can talk to a person and just try to listen to them as they are, where there’s no projection of the self that’s going on; you’re really just trying to let them be. You’re trying to receive this person on their own terms, as they’re attempting to present themselves to you. Now that’s a totally different kind of process for someone to be engaged in.

And what Simone Weil says happens when you do this is a couple things. One: you potentially become a catalyst for this person being seen at a level they’ve never really experienced before; you become a catalyst for their own transformation.

But more than that, when you do this, what this turns you into is instead of being an ego or a self projecting yourself onto the world, you become more like an antenna for the universe to express itself through you. In other words, you become, in this moment, a node that is part of a larger network. Your existence becomes about fulfilling a larger role that you always, already occupy, rather than needing to always be dominating and asserting yourself onto every situation.

This is a real-world, practical example of the kind of move that Nishitani’s talking about when someone undergoes a religious transformation. This is an everyday life example of self-emptying.

Where you stop trying so hard to filter this person through all the theories you have about how subjects relate to objects, you stop thinking about them as some object that either gets you closer to or further away from your own goals, and this emptying of the self, of these artifacts from the field of consciousness, all these tools we use, opens you up to experiencing this person, and even the world at large, in a new way, more immediately, or as Nishitani says: “to receive the emptiness of things on their own home ground.”

This point, when applied not just to a person but to our whole existence, this is the movement between the three existential standpoints that Nishitani thinks is a crucial piece of an authentic religious quest.

Now you may say at this point: wait a second, you just said that there’s three existential standpoints that we just moved through there, but I only saw two. I mean, I get that we started in the field of consciousness—I was projecting my ego onto the conversation with the hypothetical person—and then at the end, I heard Nishitani say that we’re now receiving the emptiness of things on their own home ground. That sounds a lot like sunyata, the groundless ground, the emptiness that we talked about last time.

But didn’t you say there’s consciousness, nihility, and then sunyata? Where did nihility go in this whole process?

Well nihility is an interesting one in these fields of awareness that we have. Nishitani talks about how there are a lot of ways that you can encounter nihility, and he has a really interesting quote in the book where he says one way that it’s experienced is when we encounter that which undermines the typical stable meanings that we use to make sense of reality.

So nihility, in this form he’s talking about at least, is a call back to the work we did last episode in taking Nihilism as seriously as we can. And it’s not a coincidence that the two words sound so similar.

See, what he means is, if we’re usually just living in the field of consciousness, and we have all these distractions and theoretical systems built around durable subjects and objects that in reality are not that durable, then what happens as we go throughout our lives, inevitably? The true nihility of existence, the true lack of stability to the forms we build our lives around, eventually rears its ugly head to us.

Because as it turns out, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter how much you believe that this is, you know, the political ideal we should strive for, it doesn’t matter how certain you think you are that this is really some battle between good and evil embedded into the universe, this sort of life-denying, complexity-denying way of looking at things will always be shown for what it is eventually. You wait long enough, eventually reality shatters any illusion of the stability of the theories you’re trying to simplify it with. If you doubt this, just wait for the next time you lose a loved one. Just wait until next time a relationship ends or you lose your job. Wait until you’re blindsided by something you were so certain you had a total read on. Nihility will hit you and show you the games that you’ve been playing in the field of consciousness all along.

Nishitani says in the book: “Nihility refers to that which renders meaningless the meaning of life. When we become a question to ourselves and when the problem of why we exist arises, this means that nihility has emerged from the ground of our existence and that our very existence has turned into a question mark. The appearance of this nihility signals nothing less than that one's awareness of self-existence has penetrated to an extraordinary depth.”

See, the presence of nihility in your life is not a bad thing to Nishitani. Again, it’s a sign that you’re actually expanding your understanding of existence beyond the field of consciousness. It means you’re actually engaging with religious questions, and ultimately what it means is that you’re in a place where you can learn something new about the relationship between self and being, where a deeper experience with sunyata starts to become a real possibility.

So religion is significant not because it’s something that allows us to overcome nihilism, but because when we take religion seriously and engage with nihilism more deeply, real transformation can actually happen. We can experience the emptiness of things on their own home ground of sunyata.

Nishitani has a great line in the book where he’s describing one possible piece of being on a religious quest. He says religion eventually leads us to “the real self-realization of reality.”

Now, the first time you hear that, you can be like, what, is this guy trolling? Like, what the heck does that mean?

But it’s actually a beautifully dense sentence that does make a lot of sense. And the first thing to understand about it is to understand the reason he’s using the word “realization” there.

See, if you read philosophy, one of the big challenges these thinkers will run into is that they’re often trying to push the boundaries of what human thinking and language even is the entire time that they’re writing, and what that means is that they’re often talking about concepts where there aren’t necessarily perfect words that already exist that describe the kind of things that they’re talking about.

And what you’ll come across are philosophers that will pull words from other languages that they think do a better job at describing something than the words they have in their native language.

Now most of the time, you’ll see someone pull from something like German or Russian; French is another popular one. These are languages that pretty obviously have some depth to them that is special, and philosophers will gravitate towards them if it helps to make their point. But today, my friends, today is a rare victory in this area for the English language. It’s like when England won the World Cup back in like 1962. Anyway.

The word “realization” has a double meaning when we use it in English, and it’s a double meaning that Nishitani thinks is pretty effective here. On the one hand, to realize in English, he says, means to actualize, to bring something into being. But on the other hand, realize can mean to understand, like to comprehend or to know.

When Nishitani says the real self-realization of reality, he means both of these meanings simultaneously.

When the self experiences sunyata, the groundless ground of reality, the emptiness, things on their own home ground, the illusion of separation from those things disappears. Self and world are no longer things that are experienced dualistically or separate. We experience these things as co-constituting, as it’s sometimes said. What we call the self is always giving rise to the world; the world is always giving rise to the self. Our thoughts, our experiences, our perceptions—these are all a part of the unfolding of reality. Like the example of the campfire I gave last episode, where dependent origination makes us see the boundaries between the things that make up the fire as ultimately just a matter of convention, self and world are equally entangled in the field of awareness of sunyata. And to talk about where one ends and the other begins is only something that’s possible to experience in the field of consciousness where we’re marking all these rigid separations based on forms.

Now, while it may be possible in this field of consciousness for the self to think it is “realizing the reality of the world” by coming up with all these formal distinctions about it and systems that try to understand it, while in consciousness this seems very real to us, we also know in this other field of awareness of sunyata that those same formal distinctions are experienced by us as illusions.

I mean, if you’ve never experienced it yourself, you can read the testimony of people. People will describe their experience of sunyata and say, I can’t quite put it into words. But I felt a part of something larger, like it was me, and it made sense that it was me, and that in this moment where I felt this connection, it didn’t feel like I was hallucinating, it felt like the normal filters or illusions that I usually organize things through were lifted from me for the first time.

And when you no longer have the illusion of reality being a bunch of independent, reified substances all working against each other, you arrive at what Nishitani calls the real self-realization of reality, a mutually supportive interdependence where self and world are always interpenetrating, almost like the logs, the air, and the campfire from the example we gave. Meaning whatever we are, we are always, already, in every moment, connected to, embedded in, and co-constituting the world itself.

So that double meaning of self-realization starts to make more sense under this framing. We are both actualizing and understanding reality simultaneously as our being is unfolding.

See, this is what’s sometimes called an epistemology-first approach in philosophy. This isn’t something that denies that there’s an ontological reality that exists out there, but this is an approach that prioritizes our experience of the world, and the factors that combine to make that experience even possible. These become the relevant points to focus on when reality is experienced through the field of sunyata.

The idea is, we’ll leave the dream of arriving at objective truth about the material world to the realm of consciousness, and sunyata will be for when we want to experience reality on its own home ground.

If it helps here, this is similar to that shift we talked about that is going on for many philosophers around this same time, where there’s more of a focus being given to the phenomenological framing of reality, as opposed to a purely ontological framing of reality. We need multiple different framings if we want to get a full-bodied picture of things. And here’s Nishitani finding room for both of these standpoints within this existential experience of the world that he’s describing, this religious quest.

Now you can imagine, if we take Simone Weil’s conversation with the other, where we truly receive them as they are, as one small example of the kind of shift in perspective that goes on when we see more in terms of nihility and sunyata, well, you can imagine how you might start to see things in the world and your relationship to them in a totally different way.

I mean, if you had to put the move that’s going on there into words, how would you do it? Well, to return back to it, Nishitani would say this is a move from seeing things in terms of what use they serve to me, and thinking more in terms of for what purpose do I exist.

In other words, instead of thinking, how do I want to project myself onto the world today, you might instead think about the roles that you already are always occupying, given the relationships you currently have. Are you a parent, are you a partner, are you a member of a community of thinkers, a member of a nation?

But then, outside of the human-to-human relationships we have, aren’t we also part of this larger network of things in very different ways as well? Are you a part of an ecosystem, for example, where every breath you take depends on trees and phytoplankton producing oxygen, where they also depend on you?

Are you a co-creator in the life of the soil, where the food you eat to survive comes from a collaboration between microorganisms, minerals, and many other things that’s been going on for thousands of years? Are you a part of the water cycle, where every sip of water you drink has traveled through countless rivers, clouds, even the bodies of other organisms, before it’s reached this exact moment where it happens to help you?

More than just your place in an ecosystem though, just think of the technology you use. The smartphone you have is not an isolated object. It is the culmination of labor, materials, global systems, from the cobalt that’s mined in the Congo, gallium from Kazakhstan, to the hands of the workers that put it together in factories. Even when it comes to your thoughts, can you really say these are entirely your own thoughts? Or are they shaped by books, conversations, videos, culture created by who knows how many others since the dawn of history?

See, we fill many roles in this larger network, whether we like it or not, and whether we realize it or not.

And when Nishitani talks about having an authentic religious quest, it’s about the process of awakening to this interdependence.

If you’re a parent or a partner, a member of a family who is needed for that role, is there a point where the projects you set up for yourself could become a distraction from that role or a denial of your place in a network? Is there a point where it wouldn’t just be creating value?

Or consider how much of your life might be spent trying to “fix” things about yourself—your appearance, your personality, what you’ve done in your life. Imagine always trying to meet some standard of perfection you have. You go to the gym, and it’s not because your health and the ability to use your body is part of the larger, interdependent network that keeps you alive that you’re an important piece of. No, for a lot of people, going to the gym is just a vanity project, or it’s giving in to social pressure: I gotta start going to the gym because what will people start saying about me behind my back if I gain a little weight?

But with this shift into seeing things more in the field of sunyata, another, different way that you might start to frame this very same world is that these flaws you have that you’re always trying to fix are not actually separate from the world you live in.

The wrinkles on your skin, for example, that you try to scrub off with some microdermabrasion or special cream—those wrinkles are actually evidence that time has gone by, time that connects you to everything that makes you what you are.

Your personality quirks are not imperfections or things to fix, but they’re evidence of the relationships and the trips you’ve taken that have shaped you thus far. In other words, the desire to perfect yourself all the time starts to fade in sunyata. And what’s reported by people who claim to experience it is that when you’re in this place, you can’t help but start to feel a strong sense of compassion for everything that there is around you.

Because when the illusion of separation is taken away from the world, you just start to feel like treating anything else around you in a self-serving way, at the expense of whatever it is, just seems like it’s you ultimately hurting yourself in some way. Again, this is not looking at the world in terms of what use it serves to me anymore, but more in terms of for what purpose do I exist in this larger network.

Now you can imagine how complicated this network might get. You can imagine how many moving parts there are, and how this might take somebody who has this insight, say a Mahayana Buddhist, their entire lifetime to be able to explore.

And while there are Buddhists that view sunyata as a transcendent category, meaning it’s a state of being that you need to ascend to in some way, usually by nullifying the self or normal existence—while that’s how some Buddhists see it, it’s important to remember that for Nishitani, this field of sunyata is immanent, not transcendent.

Meaning for him, sunyata is always there as a part of our experience. It’s just usually there are things that are in the way of our ability to see it.

This is why we have to self-empty if we want to get these things out of the way. It’s to clear up more room in our field of awareness to notice sunyata as it’s always there.

And certain approaches to Buddhism are filled with religious exercises that can help you try to see things in less of a dualistic way. But again, the goal for Nishitani shouldn’t be to chase sunyata, because that would be the very kind of projection of the self that blocks our ability to experience it. The goal would be to remove those sorts of projections, to open ourselves to experiencing what’s already there—a self-emptying.

When your experience is more opened like this, and you start seeing the emptiness of things on their own home ground, Nishitani thinks, you just see the relationships between things at a depth that is so different from anything we experience in the field of consciousness.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great Russian author, is another person he thinks that, when you read his writing, you just see this is a person where the way he describes things makes it obvious this is someone who’s engaged with nihilism at an extremely deep level, albeit in a different way than Nishitani engages with it, but still he gives him a ton of respect.

And I would love to do an episode talking about Dostoevsky’s work on nihilism, his contributions to existentialism, maybe we could do it by examining one of his books like we did with Camus and The Fall. As usual though, I would need to know if that’s something anybody out there would be interested in. Please help a humble podcaster like myself know what the audience desires.

Now to wrap this up today: you can probably see now why the statement God is dead, to someone like Keiji Nishitani, is not an anti-religious statement at all.

Because if we buy what Nietzsche’s selling there—that the traditional forms of hope, that objective morality is possible, is dead, and that to be an intelligent person living in the modern world makes it practically impossible to believe in the western religious stories about a God that gives you a meaning to your life—if we buy all of this, then where does that leave the modern person? Well, what Nietzsche predicted. Their starting point will be an existential crisis needing to confront nihilism. In other words, their starting point would be the very kind of engagement with nihilism that Nishitani thinks is necessary, crucial, to be able reach this deeper awareness of our own being.

What this also means then for Nishitani, and he says this in one of the first sentences of the book, is that the person that thinks they need religion the least is actually probably the person that could benefit from religion the most.

Because to be the person that sees through how superficial a lot of people’s relationship to their religion is, is to be someone actually seeking a greater level of awareness about existence. And religion, tragically, becomes something that you might write off because you see people not taking it seriously and you assume that’s all of what religion must be.

But just like with the university example, you’d be missing an opportunity if you wrote the entire thing off. If you were truly someone that wanted a deeper understanding of your existence, religion may be a way that you can do it, in the company of others who have the same goals, people you can learn from, who can inspire you on your own religious quest. And imagine writing off all of that just because you have some axe to grind with religion as a social phenomenon.