I finally have something to say to you....an inkling, a short stab, of where the next phase of my plot will be heading. Something coalescing....somewhen.... (a topological reveal-ation, the hyperspherical harmonics of meaning and mysticism....we are heading somewhere with this, somewhere called Erewhon, the Interzonal Public Librarynth)
What Nishitani Keiji unfolds in Religion and Nothingness is a re-description of Christianity, Zen, existential atheism, and nihilism in such a fashion as to render these seemingly disparate chains into several perspectives on the same (non-)structure.......
......or maybe a better description might be that, in NK's reading, these become several facets of a singular map, like tomographic plates, demonstrating a spiralling-inward to a zone where even the wailing subjectless emptiness at the heart of nihility is destroyed, where even loss is lost, where annihilation is annihilated and the hole at the heart of God (the place in God where God is not Itself, where Life and Freedom spontaneously arises in union and unison with....) and the hole at the heart of Self (....the place in Self where Self is not itself but God: the neuromystical space where boundaries disappear and differentiation collapses into unity) "metaharmonically" align.
NK uses these metasystems, systems of systems of symbolism, to trace the unboundary of the seemingly impenetrable nihility that the face of god and Cartesian dualism wall us off from, the nihility that Sartre expresses as the ecstasy of being but proceeds to make the ground of being, thereby subverting the absolute negation before it hits the absolute affirmation, generating a new wall. Nishitani declares this walling-off from nihility to be the "ego closed up within itself", a nothingness posited from within the ground of Being and therefore unable to "im-penetrate" into the meaning(-((full)ness)) of infinihility.
It is this //paradoxically both firm and penetrating and soft and envaginating//* alignment that provides the "existential conversion" from the many shades of relative emptiness and relative nihilism NK delineates into the absolute nothingness of finding a completely pure and overwhelmingly complete modal continuum in the coterminous and omnirecursive reflecting abyss wherein God and Self are not Themselves but are Each Other. This tracing is also a high resolution scouring of these religious philosophies for potential points wherein the True Black of total nihility in the face of God, the absolute nothingness of the Godhead, the Great Doubt that is true philosophical nihilism, the Great Death that is sunyatta are seen as isomorphic aspects of the locus extremis, snapshots of obliteration which may be captured and aligned to "category-theoretically" or even topologically reveal novel connections between diverse terminologies while simultaneously expanding our cognitive ecology to prepare our selves for these inverse no-wavefronts of blacklight - of which biological death, conscious-less sleep, "ego-death" and total dissociation are but 4 notes of an unbounded spectrum of non-existent OMni-tonality...made all the more Real for its nonexistence.
//Existential conversion consists in extricating oneself from a person-centered mode of being to come out on the near side, in a mode of personal being in the immediacy of the actual self. The "nothing at all" behind the person comes out into the open on the side of the self, the original self. If person be regarded as the sheer mode of self-being itself, "behind" which there is nothing, this is so because the matter is being looked at or thought about. When the "nothing at all" opens up on the near side of the personal self, however, and is seen as the sheer self itself, then nothingness really becomes actualized in the self as the true self. Then it is appropriated (in the sense of being made available) in the self. Self-existence...becomes the realisation of nothingness. "Appropriating" is not "looking at." Pressed to give it a name, we might call it a "seeing of not-seeing", a seeing that sees without seeing. True nothingness is a living nothingness, and a living nothingness can only be self-attested. - Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness//
* : Charlie Blake - 'Dronoclasm' from forthcoming Sustain//Decay on voidfrontpress.org spring 2017
