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* Soliloquy: a character’s communing with himself, thereby revealing his thoughts to an audience.
To be All One, as AL-LAH is, is to be Alone.
To be absolutely, infinitely Alone does not mean that GOD is lonely, or in need of companionship; indeed, His Aloneness is incomprehensibly true, beautiful, blissful, and sublime. Nothing can enhance it.
Only by nothing, therefore, can GOD be greater than He is Alone.
If I had anything but wordplay to account for His creation, I would use it, but explanation fails me here. I have no way to explain how all this – myself, the world, revelation, etcetera – came to be.
It was like nothing for GOD to name Himself . . . yet from that next-to-nothingness comes everything we know and are.
Before that – and when I say “before” I do not mean a sequence of events – AL-LAH as Absolute Subject was unknowable.
The TAO that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; The Named is the mother of all things.1
This is why the first verse of the Qur’an starts with “In the Name of GOD . . .” . AL-LAH precedes His Name, of course, but it is only from His Name that He is known. In His Absolute Subjectivity, He is Unmentionable, Nameless. To ‘know’ GOD, He must be named, however implicit the designation may be, and that act of naming is the first step out of His Unicity. AL-LAH is One, but any statement of the form ‘A is A1’ is already a step beyond His original, ineffable Aloneness. In absolute terms, it is a step too far, for it posits GOD as Object or Predicate, where before there was only GOD as Subject . . . and nothing more.
Are GOD-as-Subject and GOD-as-Object truly One? Absolutely . . . but in asking that we have already strayed into the dualities underlying all speech, all naming, and all creation. To illustrate how this Divine Unicity* works through the dualities implicit in things, I offer this schema:
* Reality is One. This diagram is meant only to help visualize ideas that represent the ambiguities inherent in our relationship to that Reality. Consider it to be nothing more than a depiction of how to explain to ourselves Divine Unicity generating the multiplicities of the created universe.
Although the details in this schema are important, they are neither precise nor categorical, nor should they be. They work best in a connotative cloud, where conceptual symbolism is most effective.
GOD (i.e. “THE UNKNOWABLE GOD”) is in bold letters – and nothing else is. He is the Absolutely Real, the Infinitely Definitive. From our point of view, it seems that the opposite is true; for us, GOD as the Unknowable is certainly the least definite of concepts, the most ineffable. And as Subject, He is unknown even to Himself.
This last statement may seem heretical to some who react only to the sounds of words and choke on real meanings. But it should be clear to one who thinks that anything, to be known, must appear as an object of knowledge. And so, with GOD knowing Himself, the first step out of Perfect Unicity is taken, and what I call the Transparent GOD appears on our conceptual stage. There is no difference between the two other than, from our perspective, the formal or logical one of subject and object; as I said above, it is like nothing. It is the as if in this tradition: “Excellence is that you worship GOD as if you see Him [i.e. as an object], and if you cannot see Him, truly He [i.e. the subject] sees you.”
The GOD You Already Know 