The Unsayable in Words (part I)

Many people, when they enter a discussion on spirituality and spiritual Enlightenment, sooner or later say something like:

• "It cannot be described in words."
• "He who knows doesn't speak of it."
• "You can only experience it, you cannot communicate it."

Now to disagree with it is one thing, to produce evidence that the Enlightened through the ages have described their state and/or expressed that they are Enlightened is another. This post falls in that "another" category.

1. Siddharth Gautam (circa 500 BC)
   
   "As long as my knowledge and vision of things as they actually unfold was not perfectly clear, each of the four truths in each of its three aspects - twelve turns in all - I could not claim to have realized the incomparable supreme enlightenment in this universe with its gods, its destroyers and its creators; in this generation with its recluses and its Brahmins, its spirits and its humans. But when my knowledge and vision of things as they actually unfold became perfectly clear - four truths, each with three aspects, making twelve turns in all - then I did claim to have realized the incomparable supreme enlightenment in this universe with its powers, its destroyers and creators; in this generation with its recluses and Brahmins, its spirits and its humans. Then knowledge and insight arose in me: nothing any longer holds me here; this is the last birth; there will be no more becoming." (the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta)
   
   "There is that sphere where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither the infinitude of space, nor the infinitude of consciousness (...) neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support. This, just this, is the end of dukkha." (Udana 8.1, Total Unbinding).
   
   
2. Jesus Christ (circa 1 BC)
   
   "And where I go you know, and the way you know.' Thomas said to Him, 'Lord, we do not know where You are going, and how can we know the way?' Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.'" - John 14:4-6
   
   
3. Adi Sankaracharya (circa 800 AD)
   
   "Dwelling in this body as a mere temporary halting-place, he meets the things of sense just as they come, like a child subject to another's will; thus lives the knower of the Self, who shows no outward sign, nor is attached to external things. Whether clothed in space alone, or wearing other vestures, or clothed in skins, or in a vesture of thought; like one in trance, or like a child, or like a shade, he walks the earth."
   
   "Binding and getting rid of bondage have to be spoken of because of. the existence, and yet the unreality, of enveloping by unwisdom. But there is no enveloping of the Eternal; it is not enveloped because nothing besides the Eternal exists to envelop it.
   
   "The binding and the getting rid of bondage are both mirages; the deluded attribute the work of thought to the thing itself; just as they attribute the cloud-born cutting off of vision to the sun; for the unchanging is secondless consciousness, free from every clinging stain.
   
   "The belief that bondage of the Real, is, and the belief that it has ceased, are both mere things of thought; not of the everlasting Real.
   
   "Therefore these two, glamor-built, bondage and the getting rid of bonds, exist not in the Real; the partless, changeless, peaceful; the unassailable, stainless; for what building-up could there be in the secondless, supreme reality, any more than in clear space?
   
   "There is no limiting, nor letting go, no binding nor gaining of success; there is neither the seeker of Freedom, nor the free; this, verily, is the ultimate truth."
   
   "For this world no longer is, whether past, present, or to come, after awakening to the supreme reality, in the real Self, the Eternal, from all wavering free. The snake seen in the rope exists not, nor even a drop of water in the desert mirage, where the deer thirsts.
   
   "This duality is mere glamor, for the supreme reality is not twofold; thus the scripture says, and it is directly experienced in dreamlessness."
   
   (from Vivekchudamani)
   
   
4. Mansur Al-Hallaj (circa 900 AD)
   
   "Anal Haq" ("I am the Truth").
   
   "There is nothing wrapped in my turban but God."
   


5. Meister Eckhart (circa 1300 AD)
   
   "Nothing hinders the soul so much in attaining to the knowledge of God as time and place. Therefore, if the soul is to know God, it must know Him outside time and place, since God is neither in this or that, but One and above them. If the soul is to see God, it must look at nothing in time; for while the soul is occupied with time or place or any image of the kind, it cannot recognize God." (The Nearness of the Kingdom sermon)
   
   "God's being is my life, but if it is so, then what is God's must be mine and what is mine God's. God's is-ness is my is-ness, and neither more nor less. They just live eternally with God, on a par with God, neither deeper nor higher. All their work is done by God and God's by them."
   
   "The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same--one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving."
   
   To be continued in the next part:
   
   
6. Guru Nanak Dev (circa 1500 AD)


7. Sri Ramakrishna (circa 1850 AD)


8. Ramana Maharishi (circa 1900 AD)


9. Jiddu Krishnamurti (20th century AD)


10. Chandar Mohan Jain, aka Osho (20th century AD)