The unanswerables due to ineffability:
- Whether god exists or not
- Whether god is one or many
- Whether god is permanent, impermanent or intermittent
- Whether god is universal or local
- Whether god is male or female, or neither, or both
- Whether god is concious or unconscious, sentient or insentient, cognisant or uncognisant
- Whether god is anthropomorphic or alien
- Whether god has any intentions or what those intentions are
- What god may or may not think or believe, want or wish
- Whether you can or cannot communicate with god
- Whether your beliefs about god are true or untrue
Ineffability implies incomprehensibility: that is the impenetrable wall.
There are experiences that we can have when confronting that wall, and, yes, I feel it is important to confront that wall.Those experiences can sometimes be given names like “god”, like “the peace that passes all understanding”, like “touching the divine”, like “being in the presence”, like “being touched by god”, like “seeing the light” …; these experiences are very real and can be important to our spiritual growth, but they can lead to many delusions.
Interestingly, people tend to interpret such experiences in terms of their culture, Christians in a Christian way, Muslims in an Islamic way, Hindu in a Hindu way, Buddhists in a Buddhist way, and so on. Such experiences are taken as a confirmation of the ontology of their respective weltanschauung. Thus in monotheistic cultures they are often taken as confirmation of the existence of a deity.
"Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God."
The Cloud of Unknowing
And I would suggest that even the word “god” can be one such stumbling block, one such attempt to explain experiences in terms of a familiar culture.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questionshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability
