The Ground of Being occupies a singular position in the depth-psychology corpus: it names not an object of inquiry but the precondition of all inquiry, the ontological substrate from which every particular form of consciousness, selfhood, and cosmos arises. McGilchrist provides the most sustained engagement, treating the term as a necessary ‘placeholder’ within language for what necessarily exceeds language — a sign pointing toward mystery rather than resolving it. He acknowledges the term’s insufficiency, suggesting that ‘God’ may carry more affective force in a culture that has sequestered the sacred from the secular. Welwood approaches the same territory from a Buddhist-psychotherapeutic direction, mapping the ‘open ground’ as pure, pre-differentiated presence underlying all experiential fields — what Trungpa names ‘basic openness, basic freedom.’ Plotinus, as the neo-Platonic precursor, articulates Being itself as self-subsistent, eternal, and generative, the source from which all subsequent existents derive their trace of the Good. Aurobindo distinguishes Being as fundamental reality from Becoming as its dynamic expression, resisting any account that renders Becoming self-sufficient. Heidegger’s project in Being and Time runs parallel without using the phrase directly: his sustained interrogation of the meaning of Being and its groundless ‘abyss’ (Abgrund) frames the entire problem-space that later psychological appropriations of the term presuppose. The central tension across the corpus is epistemological: whether the Ground of Being can be approached through reason, symbolic language, contemplative practice, or must remain the inarticulate horizon of all three.
In speaking of the ground of Being, we do not provide an answer, but draw attention to a problem. The point is not to make a question go away
McGilchrist argues that invoking the Ground of Being is a gesture of sustained attention toward irreducible ontological mystery, not a premature explanatory closure.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
In speaking of the ground of Being, we do not provide an answer, but draw attention to a problem. The point is not to make a question go away
McGilchrist argues that invoking the Ground of Being is a gesture of sustained attention toward irreducible ontological mystery, not a premature explanatory closure.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God may be a better name than just ‘the ground of Being’ for this creative mystery. A phrase like ‘the ground of Being’, too, may have its conventional, cultural baggage – in this case, its presumed dullness.
McGilchrist argues that while ‘ground of Being’ serves as a philosophical placeholder, its culturally conditioned flatness may require supplementation by language that carries the weight of awe and the sacred.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
God may be a better name than just ‘the ground of Being’ for this creative mystery. A phrase like ‘the ground of Being’, too, may have its conventional, cultural baggage – in this case, its presumed dullness.
McGilchrist argues that while ‘ground of Being’ serves as a philosophical placeholder, its culturally conditioned flatness may require supplementation by language that carries the weight of awe and the sacred.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe
McGilchrist establishes that any discourse on the Ground of Being requires an apophatic ‘un-word’ — a term held loosely open rather than defined, because precision at the outset destroys understanding.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe
McGilchrist establishes that any discourse on the Ground of Being requires an apophatic ‘un-word’ — a term held loosely open rather than defined, because precision at the outset destroys understanding.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Speaking of the ground of Being, the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki writes: ‘The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking: it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it.’
McGilchrist mobilises Eastern contemplative testimony — Suzuki, Confucius, Lao Tzu — to demonstrate that all traditions converge on the unnameable character of the Ground of Being, a convergence obscured in Western secular culture by the rupture between sacred and profane.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Speaking of the ground of Being, the Zen monk Shunryū Suzuki writes: ‘The true source, ri, is beyond our thinking: it is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it.’
McGilchrist mobilises Eastern contemplative testimony — Suzuki, Confucius, Lao Tzu — to demonstrate that all traditions converge on the unnameable character of the Ground of Being, a convergence obscured in Western secular culture by the rupture between sacred and profane.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
the open ground can be felt as the sense of pure being that underlies all our differentiated experiences… ‘basic openness, basic freedom, a spacious quality; and we have now and have always had this openness. It is natural being which just is.’
Welwood, drawing on Trungpa, maps the Ground of Being experientially as the ‘open ground’ — a pre-differentiated, primordial awareness that underlies all subject-object structure and constitutes the deepest stratum of the experiential field.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
The Absolute manifests itself in two terms, a Being and a Becoming. The Being is the fundamental reality; the Becoming is an effectual reality: it is a dynamic power and result, a creative energy and working out of the Being
Aurobindo articulates the Ground of Being as the Absolute’s fundamental pole, distinguishing it from Becoming as its dynamic, creative expression — a distinction that resists any collapse of the cosmos into pure process.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
Being, the most firmly set of all things, that in virtue of which all other things receive Stability, possesses this Stability not as from without but as springing within, as inherent.
Plotinus characterises the Ground of Being as self-subsistent Stability — the intrinsic ontological support from which all subsequent existents derive their capacity to persist, not as an external foundation but as an inner, generative necessity.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Being is thus beyond contact not because it stands alone but because it is Being. For Being alone has Being in its own right.
Plotinus establishes Being’s radical self-sufficiency and untouchability, grounding all derived existences in a principle that neither receives from nor is affected by what it generates — an anticipation of the apophatic tradition McGilchrist later surveys.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
each being is an eternal product of a whole and is at once a whole and an individual manifesting as part but, to the keen vision There, known for the whole it is.
Plotinus presents each particular existent as simultaneously grounded in and expressive of the whole, such that the Ground of Being is not separate from its manifestations but immanently present within each as that by which it is what it is.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
the mystery that the cosmos should exist at all, and exist in the way I have accounted for it up to the end of this chapter. This is an order of questions that it is beyond science’s reach to answer
McGilchrist demarcates the Ground of Being as the proper domain of philosophical and theological inquiry — the question of why anything exists at all — which science is structurally unable to address.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the mystery that the cosmos should exist at all, and exist in the way I have accounted for it up to the end of this chapter. This is an order of questions that it is beyond science’s reach to answer
McGilchrist demarcates the Ground of Being as the proper domain of philosophical and theological inquiry — the question of why anything exists at all — which science is structurally unable to address.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
the truth arrived at through realization of the deep nature of mind is living, contemplative truth, which reveals a deeper order of being beyond both thinking mind and felt experience.
Welwood situates the Ground of Being as accessible only through contemplative realization — a third order of truth that transcends both conceptual and felt-experiential knowing.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
since the First has never come to be, we cannot speak of it either as coming by chance into being or as not master of its being.
Plotinus insists that the First Principle — the ultimate Ground of Being — is beyond causation and chance, self-complete and self-mastered, a formulation that underwrites the apophatic tradition’s refusal to subject Being to ordinary predication.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
He stood for the soul as the first human reality. He took no root metaphor from biology or sociology… but, by demonstrating the capacity for self-transformation of the human personality towards uniqueness, he stood squarely for the individual.
Hillman characterises Jung’s foundational move as grounding psychological inquiry in the primacy of psychic reality — a functional analogue to the philosophical priority of Being over its derivative categories.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964aside
there is that which exists eternally, not divided, subject to no change of state, neither coming into being nor falling from it, set in no region or place or support, emerging from nowhere, entering into nothing
Plotinus characterises the eternal ground of existence as utterly without spatial or temporal conditioning — a description of the Ground of Being as that which cannot be located because it is the condition of all location.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside