The Self-Eating Expression is the universal phrasing for the intuition of Not-Two in the vocabulary of the speaker. It is a summary-term put-forth by pioneering inquirers when finally confronting ‘The Wall’ of Not-Two.
The Tao
From the opening line of the opening verse of Chinese classic, Lao Tzu’s, Tao Te Ching [Circa 5th Century BCE], the first philosophy of China:
‘The True Tao is nameless; what is named is not the True Tao. The True Tao cannot be told; what is told is not the True Tao’.
Name the Tao, and what you have named, by that very fact, is not the Tao. Talk about the Tao and what you are talking about is not the Tao. The Tao is a ‘ Self-Eating Expression‘.
But this didn’t stop Lao Tzu from writing his seminal classic the Tao Te Ching which names and talks all about the Tao [sort of like this Site].
’Taoism’s instructs all men to live in Wie Wu Wei: ‘Doing Not-Doing’. The Bhagavad Gita exhorts the man to: ‘Active-Inaction’. Or as the Chinese Taoists [Hsi-tz’u] declared, it is: ‘Where Yin and Yang do not penetrate [we call it the Numinous]’.
The Buddha-Dharma
The opening Koan from the venerated Mumonkon Collection is: ‘Joshu’s Mu!’, held through history as the most powerful of all Zen-Koans.
‘Joshu’s Mu!’ is a negative particle, a vociferous assertion of negation. A fiery, full-blast ‘Self-Eating Expression‘.
An early condition for the seminal Buddhist expression Śūnyathā was as Śūnyathāsūnyathā, the ‘Emptiness of Emptiness Itself’. Corral Emptiness and what you have corralled, by that very fact is not Emptiness. The earliest definition of Śūnyathā was as ‘This Unformulated Principle’ [Front Page] before it diluted into various ‘Doctrines Of Codependence.
[The term ‘Emptiness’ was borrowed from the translated English vocabulary of Classical Logic [See Post]. ‘Emptiness’ has nothing to do with imaginary spaces of vast blankness, a common miscue in modern Sanghas.]
The Dharma
Upanishad is Rahasya: a ‘Secret Transmission’, not to be passed-on to the unprepared. Sanskrit sacred text expands from an unsaid center in concentric circles of ferociously absurd verse softening to increasing sensibility.
At the peak of Vedic intent, Brahman is Nirguna Brahman (without attributes; you cannot express something with no attributes. As Sahguna Brahman, (with attributes) all names are unabashed contradictions: Being-Becoming; Sonant-Silent; Eternal-Temporal; Explicit-Implicit, and so on. In our terminology, Self-Eating Expressions.
According to the Kanchi Paramacharya [1894-1994], holder of the lineage-seat and an authority on the subject, ‘The Nameless’ is the original name for the wider umbrella of Schools and Faiths that is known as ‘Hinduism’. Is the word: ‘Nameless’ a name or not a name? It is neither; it is a ‘Self-Eating Expression‘.
Islam
The Aramaic Alaha, the language that Jesus spoke, is in turn related to the Arabic Allah: ‘The God’, and the Hebrew: Eloah [Elohim, Elohai]. It was originally a loose reference to a regional deity and in-time appropriated into emerging Islam.
The opening line of the principle prayer of Islam, the Shahadah reads: ‘La Ilaha il al-Lah’: ‘There is no God if it be not the God’.
‘La Ilaha il al-lah’, is an informed rendering of insight as ‘Self-Eating Expression‘ meant for the trained ear and in the language of the day. In High-Sufism [Islamic Mysticism] the final stage of practice is termed Fana al-Fana, the ‘Annihilation of Annihilation itself’. A ‘Self-Eating Expression‘; naturally, necessarily.
Aristotle’s ‘God’
Aristotle formulated hugely influential models of reality [they lasted well past Copernicus; Immanuel Kant begins with him]. But oddly enough, Aristotle installed a strange character at the sanctum-sanctorum of his precise modeled world.
From Aristotle’s Metaphysics: ‘There is therefore also an Unmoved-Mover, being eternal, primary and in act..the first mover is a necessary Being..and is thus a first principle, for there is always a mover of things moved, and the first mover is itself unmoved.’ Aristotle’s celebrated: ‘Unmoved-Mover’. A classic ‘Self-Eating Expression‘.
[See the later Post on how Aristotle uses a variant of it as his defense of the ‘Principle of Contradiction’ [in delightful irony, also called ‘The Principle of Non-Contradiction’], what he called: ‘The First Principle of all Analytic Cognition’.]
Proofs And Paradoxes
The ‘Self-Eating Expression‘ is pervasive not just in ancient texts and traditions but at the heart of modern logic and mathematics and their most celebrated Proofs and Paradoxes. We’ll get to the one’s that mark the birth of the present digital-age of Binary-Truths, the period 1930-1950 CE, in later Posts.
Not-Two 