The silence of sound

crystallizing nondual metaphysics through the invocation of a divine name or mantra

Patrick Laude

pp. 39-55

in: Olga Louchakova-Schwartz (ed), The problem of religious experience, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

Starting with Henry Corbin's suggestion that phenomenology can be approached as "the unveiling of the hidden," the phenomenon is what appears to a consciousness that unveils it as meaningful. Now, in Sufi theosophy, the world is none other than the intentional object of God: "I was a hidden treasure, and I wanted to be known, so I created the world."This opens onto the question of the Word: the Word is God's knowledge of Himself, but also the principle of creation. Mystagogically the Word has been referred to as the Name of God. Contemplatives have experienced the Name as a spiritual means of spiritual union, and as such a response to the creative Word.It is within this context that I intend to analyze the bifurcation between silence and invocation. Is contemplative silence bound to fall back onto the limitations of the individual self? Must one think of the invocation of a sacred Name or Word as the methodical guarantee, as it were, of a transcendence of the ordinary egotic consciousness? On the other hand, apophatic spirituality postulates that what lies at the core of contemplative prayer is not the egotic consciousness but the universal and transcendent Selfhood, which Advaita refers to as Ātman. So one of the major questions to elucidate is that of the relationship between contemplative silence as transcendence and the Word or Name as an immanent means of Self-realization.

Cited authors

Corbin Henry