What Is Unitive Knowledge?
Across many centuries and languages, contemplatives have described a kind of knowing that does not stand at a distance from what it knows. They call it union, realization, vision, gnosis or awakening. We use the phrase unitive knowledge for that family of descriptions, and for the inquiry into them.
Unitive knowledge is a field of inquiry, not a doctrine. It does not assume that all religions are the same, or that the mystics agree, or that any of them is right. It asks what these descriptions are describing, how far they converge, where they genuinely differ, and what difference such knowledge makes to a human life.
Definition§
Most of what we call knowledge keeps a distance between knower and known: a belief about something, a perception of something, a skill for doing something. The traditions we study describe a knowing in which that distance is overcome, so that to know the ultimate is in some sense to be it, or to be one with it, or to be transformed by it. The Upaniṣads say that the self is Brahman; Plotinus speaks of the soul becoming one with the One; Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystics speak of union with God; Buddhist traditions speak of an awakening in which the grasping self falls away.
These are not the same claim. “Union” can mean identity, in which two turn out to be one; communion, in which two remain two and are joined; or the discovery of a wholeness that was always there. Part of the work of this field is to keep these senses apart.
Philosophical foundations§
Three branches of philosophy supply the field with its terms and its hardest questions. Metaphysics asks what is ultimately real: a supreme being, a ground beyond being, pure consciousness, emptiness, a way. Epistemology asks what kind of knowledge could reach it, and what could justify such a claim. Philosophy of mind asks what consciousness is, and whether the self that seeks the ultimate is what it seems.
The contemplative traditions have their own philosophies, often as rigorous as any in the West: the Vedānta schools, Madhyamaka and Yogācāra, Neoplatonism, Islamic philosophy, Kabbalah. Unitive knowledge, as an inquiry, takes them seriously as philosophy, not only as testimony.
Historical development§
The question is old. The Upaniṣads, Plato and the early Buddhist texts already distinguish ordinary knowing from a knowledge that liberates. Neoplatonism shaped the mystical theology of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In the medieval and early modern periods, mystics in every tradition wrote guides, poems and treatises on the soul’s return to its source.
In the nineteenth century the translation of Asian scriptures into European languages made comparison possible on a new scale, and in the twentieth the study of mysticism became a field of its own, from William James and Evelyn Underhill to the perennialists and their critics. Today it draws on history, philology, philosophy, psychology and the contemplative traditions themselves.
Religious pluralism§
Why are there many traditions, and can their truths be reconciled? Some answer that one truth underlies them all; some that each has its own goal; some that only one is true. This journal does not settle the question. It treats it as one of the Great Questions, to which no single answer is owed.
Where to begin§
The Begin Here reading list is a short path into the subject. The Library has pages on the traditions, thinkers, concepts and texts the field draws on, and the Great Questions gather the traditions’ answers side by side. Metanoia, the journal, publishes essays, studies and commentaries every two weeks.