Giving the Finger to My Readers

Like many doctrines, creatio ex nihilo is at least equally intended to avoid misunderstanding as it is to convey any cutandry understanding. 

Frankly, the term doesn't lend itself to the latter, since nothing is neither conceivable nor ontologically possible, i.e., it is more apophatic than cataphatic. Unless nothing is actually something, in which case, No principle of noncontradiction for you!, and the world is fundamentally unintelligible.

The point of the principle is that God doesn't create out of some preexisting material sitting around at the Om Depot. This is because the Om is ontologically prior to the Depot:

Whatsoever has existed, whatsoever exists, whatsoever shall exist hereafter, is OM. And whatsoever transcends past, present, and future, that also is [you guessed it] OM (Mundukya Upanishad). 

Our Ultimate Principle or Whatever creates even being itself. Says so right here in the Taittiriya Upanishad:

In the beginning all this was Non-being. From it Being appeared. Itself created itself. 

Here's some similar nonsense from the Rig Veda, which may even have inspired Bob's own nonsensical creation myth:

Then Non-Being was not, nor Being. What was that ocean profound and impenetrable? Then death was not, nor immortality.... Darkness concealed in darkness in the beginning was all this ocean.... Desire in the beginning became active, -- desire, the first deed.

Or love. And knowledge:

Out of the infinite ocean of existence arose Brahma, first-born and foremost among the gods. From him sprang the universe, and he became its protector. The knowledge of Brahman, the foundation of all knowledge, he revealed to his firstborn son,  Atharva.

Now, even if you prefer the account in Genesis (and echoed in John), you have to admit that this isn't bad, no? Certainly it is closer to the truth than any scientistic creation myth, and infinitely so, because we are faced with a binary choice of principles: creation or non-creation, O or Ø. There's no in between. Or no! in between. 

Me, I like to think of the really venerable creation myths as giving us points of reference in order to think about the unthinkable. Strictly speaking, God is by definition unthinkable, and unthinkable means unthinkable, unless... see last sentence of paragraph two. 

Now, like the Bible, the Upanishads is not a unitary book but a collection of diverse writings. And like the Bible, taken literally it can even contradict itself here and there. Which is why you can't just stare at the finger(s) of the sages. Rather, the fingers are again local points of reference pointing to the nonlocal and ineffable. 

To extend the metaphor, these fingers point to something they can never grasp, because the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao -- this being one of those rare places where we must give a pass to the principle of noncontradiction, similar to the principle that God is one and three. 

Now that I'm thinking about it, somewhere along the line there must be a "violation" of the principle of noncontradiction, whether or not one acknowledges it. We've all heard bonehead atheists ask, If everything is created, what created God?, as if that's some kind of metaphysical checkmate, instead of painting the atheist into his own dark coroner where all the squares are black.

If the doctrine of creation from nothing gives us the finger, to what does the finger point? And equally important, to what does it not point? First and foremost, it means that 

creation "comes from" -- that is the meaning of the word ex -- an origin; not from a cosmic, hence "created" substance, but from a reality pertaining to the Creator (Schuon).

So, in one sense creation is a private party to which we aren't invited. But viewed from another angle, the miracle is that we are indeed invited, and this on many levels. There is a general invitation, while others are quite personal. How did they get my address?!

Come to think of it, this is obviously the meaning of the slapstick passage on p. 15 of my book:

Oh my stars, He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image! You haven't perceived the hologram to your private particle? Come in, open His presence and report for karmic duty. Why, it's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf.

When writing that, I couldn't decide if the humor was too broad or too obscure. I guess both, depending on the reader.  

Meanwhile, is this post getting anywhere? I want to say that another important area where the principle of noncontradiction doesn't hold is vis-a-vis transcendence and immanence. These two are as seemingly opposite as wave and particle, and yet, necessary attributes of God. 

In fact, you could even say that God is immanent because transcendent, because transcendence spills out all over the place.

No, it's not that God is sloppy, rather, because he is Absolute, and the first entailment of Absoluteness is Infinitude. The latter is like the divine ray of creation that radiates everywhere. 

Except it is not impersonal, which very much points to the gnocean that the Father engenders, and never stops engendering, the Son -- who is like that drop embraced by the sea held within the drop (p. 263), to utterly contradict myself, I hope.

The Son is at once "relative" to the Father, but this relativity turns out to be absolute, such that God is Absolute Relativity. I can count on three fingers what this post is pointing to, but we're out of time for now.