The same thing happens if we begin from the opposite side and look on absorption, or entering, into the Self (whether by means of the Self’s deliverance from all being that is conditioned by I, or by its being understood aa the One thinking Essence) as the essential element in the religious act. By the first way of looking on the act it is imagined that God enters the being that is freed from I, or that this being is merged in God; by the second, that the being takes its stand directly in itself as though it were in the divine One. That is, by the first way, in a supreme moment the saying of the Thou ceases, for there is no more twofold being, and by the second the saying of the Thou does not in truth exist at all, for there is in truth no twofold being: the first way believes in the unification, the second in the identification of the human with the divine. Both assert a state that is beyond I and Thou, the first—as in ecstasy—one that becomes, the second—as in the self-observation of the thinking subject—one that is and that reveals itself. Both abolish elation, the first as it were dynamically, through the swallowing up of the I by the Thou which is, however, no longer Thou, but that which alone is—and the second as it were statically through the self-recognition of the I, which has been freed and has become the Self, as that which alone is. If the doctrine of dependence considers the I that bears the span of pure relation in the world to be so weak and empty that its ability to bear it is no longer credible, the one doctrine of absorption causes the span of relation to disappear at its consummation, the other treats it as a delusion to be overcome.
The doctrines of absorption appeal to the great sayings of identification, the one above all to the Johannine “I and the Father are one”, the other to the teaching of Sandilya: “The all-embracing, this is my Self in my very heart”
The ways these sayings lead are opposed to one another. The first arises (after a subterranean course) in the life of a person of mythical proportions and advances to a doctrine, the second emerges in a doctrine and only then leads to the mythical life of a person. The character of the saying is transformed along these lines. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that once became flesh, leads to the Christ of Eckehardt, perpetually begotten by God in the human soul. The coronation formula for the Self in the Upanishad, “This is the real, the Self, and Thou art the Self”, leads in a much shorter space to the Buddhistic formula of dethronement, “It is not possible to lay hold of a Self and a Self-appertaining in truth and in reality”.
The beginning and end of each way demand separate consideration.
That the appeal to the ἓν ἔσμεν cannot be substantiated becomes clear to all who read impartially, section by section, the Gospel according to John. It is really the Gospel of pure relation. Here is a truer verse than the familiar mystical verse: “I am Thou and Thou art I”. The Father and the Son, like in being—we may even say God and Man, like in being—are the indissolubly real pair, the two bearers of the primal relation, which from God to man is termed mission and command, from man to God looking and hearing, and between both is termed knowledge and love. In this relation the Son, though the Father dwells and works in him, bows down before the “greater” and prays to him. All modern attempts to interpret this primal reality of dialogue as a relation of the I to the Self, or the like—as an event that is contained within the self-sufficient interior life of man—are futile: they take their place in the abysmal history of destruction of reality.