A Theology of Non-Separation — Enlightenment, YHWH, Love, and Return
Foundations: Mathematics, Theology, Philosophy, and Ontology.
My theology began in a struggle with God, a loss of the sense that the self stands independently, and a subsequent acceptance of the love of Christ.
Freedom is enlightenment: recognizing the non-separation of self and other while having root access to define oneself. Freedom in my theology begins here.
I described the personal path in A Declaration of War on God, I Cannot Die, and YHWH. Here I set out what I believe and how I intend to live through it. The trilogy’s conclusion
1. No One Can Own the Name of God
In the burning-bush passage of Exodus, the response to Moses in 3:14 includes Ehyeh asher ehyeh, followed by the divine name in 3:15. Reading these together differs from treating them as a simple translation identity. Exodus 3
I read the scene as a summons against the monopolization of existence’s name by power. Someone who speaks God’s name cannot make their own judgment identical with God.
In my earlier essay, I addressed the divine name as your name. This expresses my faith in the non-separation of self and God. It does not mean that etymology has proved every human being identical with God.
I reject the use of God’s name to close off questions directed at oneself. My own theology remains open to those questions.
2. Accepting Both Non-Separation and Finitude
I do not regard the self as an independent substance standing outside the world. Birth, language, food, and the support of others already constitute me.
I receive this inseparability also as non-separation from God. It does not make my knowledge or power infinite. I am finite: I make mistakes, become exhausted, and can harm others.
Faith in non-separation cannot justify making my judgment absolute. It asks for humility: I cannot speak exhaustively for the world.
3. Enlightenment Is the Freedom to Redefine Oneself
Being inseparable from God does not mean permanently surrendering the definition of my life to someone else. I can reconsider definitions supplied by parents, institutions, religion, or yesterday’s self, and take responsibility for what I will live as.
I call this freedom enlightenment, and root access to self-definition. It is access to the standpoint that produces a self-image, beyond merely operating inside the image already assigned to me. Enlightenment Is Root Access
Because the self is not an eternal substance, it can be defined anew. Because self and other are not separate, that definition is never unrelated to others and the world. Freedom and responsibility arise together here.
4. Kanjizai Bodhisattva: Taking Up the Practice of Seeing
The Heart Sutra begins with Kanjizai Bodhisattva. It is a short scripture widely recited in Japan. My impression is that many people two generations older than me can recite it from memory. This is a personal impression of its familiarity, not a demographic finding. I find it significant that such familiar words begin with Kanjizai. The scripture in Japanese practice
Kanjizai and Kannon refer to the same bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara. My emphasis is on the figure who practices the Buddhist path, rather than on assigning a lower rank. A bodhisattva is more than simply a believer: the term concerns awakening and the work of helping sentient beings. Daikakuji’s explanation
I read Kanjizai as seeing freely. One takes up seeing oneself, rather than receiving every perspective from authority. One can also let go of one’s first view instead of making it absolute. This reading connects my theology with my philosophy.
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” We undo the fixation that self and world are exhausted by this standpoint, this common sense, this name. Even emptiness must not become another fixed object. We return to the concrete world to see again, choose, and relate.
The freedom that opens here is what I call enlightenment. We awaken to non-separation and return to the root from which we define ourselves. In this sense, Kanjizai is a way of living with root access.
5. Freedom Makes a Renewed Choice of Love and Covenant Possible
For me, accepting Christ’s love after enlightenment does not mean losing the freedom I have gained. Within the freedom to redefine myself, I choose the love by which I want to live.
That choice grants no authority to force others into my definition. Neither God’s name nor an awareness of enlightenment qualifies me to silence someone who points out my error.
A freely chosen covenant is lived through subsequent action. I speak of love and repentance as ways of practicing freedom of self-definition within relation.
6. Love Receives Another’s Life as One’s Own Concern
I have understood love as non-separation and self-expansion. Another’s joy or suffering ceases to be irrelevant to me. What I protect and respond to changes. Love as Self-Expansion
Yet experiencing another as part of myself gives me no right to own them. Their refusal, departure, and choice of a life different from mine belong within a relationship that values them.
I receive Christ’s love as a direction through which to examine the power of self-expansion. Greater power to incorporate is not automatically greater goodness. Does the relationship help the other live, or make them obey me? I ask that question through the consequences of action.
Precisely because I believe in non-separation, concrete relationships require conscious boundaries.
7. Do Not Erase Suffering with the Language of the Whole
If everything is related, harm and suffering are within the world too. Simply saying that everything is one can erase the experience of the person who has been hurt.
I have no explanation that justifies every suffering. Non-separation from God does not require the suffering person to endure abuse.
The response must be concrete: stop harm, establish distance, protect, apologize, repair. Faith supports the undertaking of those actions.
8. Covenant and Repentance Change Future Relations
A covenant undertakes a way of relating from now on. Its meaning is not completed at the moment of speech. Later action sustains the words.
Repentance is similar. The past cannot be made not to have happened. Yet a person’s future need not be closed by a past act. I connected this thought to a web that retains history while allowing return. History and return
Return is not the immediate restoration of authority. Trust must be established again in a new relationship. Someone who speaks of forgiveness must not force renewed contact or reconciliation upon the person harmed.
9. What Continues after Death?
My words “I cannot die” arose from an experience in which the separation of self dissolved. I distinguish that experience, my account of causal inheritance, and faith concerning what follows death.
My words and actions continuing in others is a different claim from my first-person consciousness continuing after death. Technology that preserves records does not guarantee the survival of consciousness.
Nevertheless, I do not want to live solely by the measure of my own ending. How will I pass on what I have received to those who live afterward? I undertake that question as a responsibility directed beyond death.
My theology rests on non-separation, freedom as enlightenment, root access to redefine oneself, awareness of finitude, and a response through love and covenant. Seeing freely also means returning to the world in which we live with others.
The Heart Sutra in Full
The following is a new English rendering of the classical Chinese text attributed to Xuanzang. It includes the concluding title. It is not a quotation from a modern English translation. The interpretive discussion above is my own; the text below provides the scripture to which it responds. Classical source
The Heart Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, while practicing the profound perfection of wisdom, clearly saw that the five aggregates were all empty, and crossed beyond all suffering and distress.
Shariputra, form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. Form is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely form. Feeling, perception, formations, and consciousness are also like this.
Shariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of emptiness: neither arising nor ceasing, neither defiled nor pure, neither increasing nor decreasing.
Therefore, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, perception, formations, or consciousness; no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or object of mind; no realm of the eye, and so on through no realm of mental consciousness.
There is no ignorance and no ending of ignorance, and so on through no aging and death and no ending of aging and death. There is no suffering, origin, cessation, or path; no wisdom and no attainment, because there is nothing to attain.
Bodhisattvas, relying on the perfection of wisdom, have no obstruction in their minds. Having no obstruction, they have no fear. Far removed from inverted views and dreamlike imaginings, they reach ultimate nirvana.
The buddhas of the three times, relying on the perfection of wisdom, attain unsurpassed, complete awakening.
Therefore know the perfection of wisdom to be the great sacred mantra, the mantra of great illumination, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequalled mantra, able to remove all suffering, true and not false.
Therefore the mantra of the perfection of wisdom is proclaimed. The mantra is spoken thus:
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
The Heart Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom
The mantra is retained in Sanskrit transliteration, as a mantra, rather than presented as an unambiguous English sentence.