Nagarjuna's Philosophy as presented in the Maha-Prajnaparamita Sastra by K. Venkata Ramanan

I ask you, can you put your hand in the same river twice? Raja Rao

Does a waterfall ever change? Raja Rao

It is with rash insolence that we belittle the great to our own measure, as when talking of God. Blaise Pascal

Neither doeth anyone know the Father, but the son, and he to whom it shall please the son to reveal him. Matthew 11-27

As stated previously, I am not a scholar which does not mean I won't enter into some conjecture about the religious or philosophical schools of India, the world. Here I am primarily concerned with Nagarjuna's philosophy. I've written about Yoga, the Mandukya Upanishad also. A cursory reading by anyone reveals all those involved in the development, establishment, furtherance, of these systems were well versed in the work of their coevals, predecessors. A common style, common thread is discernible. They contend with one another, vie for attention, compete, use one another's work as part of the learning process, as talking points. It has ever been so. Taken together the various formulations, structures, make a kind of dialectic. One leads to the next and is developed further and another plateau is established as ground for even more developed systems. Centuries, millennia are involved, yet these people, enlightened beings, talk to each other like you and I might, so, like contemporaries. They must have had a sense of time not common to most people. Buddha makes his mark and Jesus, a close study would reveal, counters with another. And, this writer, at least, finds it interesting that Jesus and Buddha walked the earth so near one another in time and that their teaching had in common an emphasis on compassion or love. Great teachers, Lords, appear and are followed immediately by those who would explain or amplify the insights. The author of the Mandukya Upanishad, Guadapada gives way to Sankara for amplification. In later times Desani puts it all in order for a new generation. It is like a celestial orchestration of self realization, actualization. And, to be sure, the bloom is ever on that rose. For any who have developed an appreciation, these expositions are exquisitely beautiful. The proponents were dedicated to and loved their work. One is joined in their joy of having found the precious gems and delighted in sharing them with anyone who might benefit. True, its said, some authors would sign well known names to their work in order to get attention; for instance, the Bhagavad Gita was a later work than the parent to which it is attributed - it is said.

The commonalities abound in Judeo Christian and Indian philosophies. and are centered around self realization, actualization, understanding the Truth. At University Raja Rao taught a course on Mahayana Buddhism. The text book was the one in the title of this post. An internet search reveals this work is still in print.

So, from the Vedas of the Indian sub-continent, to the contributions of Rabbinic Judaism of the Middle East, to the Upanishads, back in India, to Tibet, to China, Japan, its a long road from antiquity to modern times. Nagarjuna, who likely lived about a century after Christ, five centuries after the Gautama Buddha, takes up the task of setting to right what he considers to be the straying teachings of those who came after the Buddha. It might be said he was to the Buddha as Jesus' disciples were to him, though, of course, the disciples were contemporaries of Jesus.

Ramanan was a fellow at Harvard's Yenching Institute and this work was published with their assistance. Nagarjuna's Prajnaparamita, which means the way of the perfection of wisdom wasn't available in India at that time. Dr. Ramanan, traveling in China, found a copy translated by one Kumarajiva. It is also noted that Kumarajiva translated some texts on dhyana (meditation) and that his disciple, Tao-Sheng has been credited with founding the precursor to Ch'an (or Zen) Buddhism .

Buddha, Nagarjuna were proponents of the so called Middle Way (Madhyamika) which in turn came under the heading of Mahayana Buddhism, the highest truth of which is known, realizable in the state reached through contemplation, meditation, trance (dharna, dhyana, samadhi) as Nirvana.

Nirvana is not the Judeo-Christian heaven and, for that matter Buddha was never proclaimed as God. The family unit used in Judeo-Christianity as a metaphor to make easily understood the basic principles of the ultimate reality is not used at all in Buddhism. For that matter it isn't used in any of the systems with which this writer is familiar except the Abrahamic religions. Buddha was considered Lord and no doubt it could be claimed, as I do, that he enjoyed a hypostatic union with the divine creative spirit, the ultimately real substratum from which mundane, relative existence comes to be. Relative existence, mundane things, are said to have conditioned reality and really are nothing in themselves. Having originated in the undifferentiated, changeless, unutterable ground of reality they reflect the ultimate even while having no separate existence. As ever changing entities they owe their essence to that from which they emanate, from which they spring and return to on expiring.  The manifest has no self being and the purpose of the created is only to fulfill the potentialities of the substratum.

Buddha's core teaching was to make accessible a path out of the suffering, pain of existence in this world. To this end a great edifice of categories, causes, effects, a virtual world of sometimes very intricate formulae was built up and taught in a great variety of ways to his followers. Many other schools of thought on these matters existed before and clearly Buddhism takes these into account. After all, the Vedas date back perhaps four or five thousand years. They are the basis of Hinduism and the Upanishads are considered late or post Vedic writings.

It doesn't take a scholar to see the common threads running through these ancient texts. The Prajnaparamita lays them out in a concise, easily understood manner. As already mentioned a basic tenet is that the conditioned reality has no meaning other than that borrowed from the unconditioned, ultimately real. Things of dependent origination are sunya, empty. What is Real is the conditioned in its eternal aspect.

What is common in all philosophy, in  all religion is the thirst for the Real. All that differs is the Way to that end. Jesus said "I am the Way, the Truth, the Life. No man cometh to the father except by me." Buddha said the same thing substituting the ultimate reality for father. He said he actually was the unconditioned reality apart from that conditioned form with which he was embodied, made apparent. Made apparent. What is made apparent? Well, it is obfuscated by clinging. Clinging to illusion, to passion, to false knowledge, all kinds of things. Only proper understanding cultivated over a long time, with compassion, without hatred, anger, greed, in short, with clean living, can lead to a full self-realization; but mostly, avoiding the error of misplaced absolutes leads one to the truth of the undivided nature of ultimate reality, birthlessness, unaffected by time.

Nagarjuna set himself to the exposition of the teachings of the Prajnaparamita-sutras which "...embody the central teaching that the ultimate nature of the determinate is itself the unconditioned reality - that in the ultimate truth, the undivided being, there is no division of conditioned and unconditioned.." The wise do not cling to the determinate as indeterminate. The wise do not cling at all. What is speakable is determinate. Only silence, for the wise, pertains to the highest truth. Thus it is that the tendency to seize is the root of conflict and suffering.

The indeterminate is not a separate reality from the determinate, something to be realized transcendentaly, because determinate entities are dependent on the indeterminate as their ground. The ultimate truth cannot be taught, says Nagarjuna except in the context of the mundane. The ultimate truth can, however, be comprehended and only then can Nirvana be attained. I would add that its unlikely that it would be granted by a higher being though I believe that one who sets himself to the task gains assistance in some way from beings greater than ourselves. This I was taught. It has to be an achievement of one's own efforts to have a full meaning. No specific view can be had of that. Being a specific view connotes divided being. Thus it is said that silence is the ultimate truth for the wise.

This makes me reflect again on Rabbinic Judaism. YHWH is supposed to be God's name. But it has no vowels, is unpronounceable. Seems to me that the same understanding of the ultimate reality is at play here as for the Buddhists. The ultimate reality cannot be known, named, owned, or even pronounced. Only the conditioned can and this is owning an illusion since the conditioned has no reality, essence, unique to itself as a seemingly separate entity. To name God is to bind the ultimate reality to the world of named objects. I suppose that, also, is why Soren Kierkegaard made his well known statement that God doesn't exist, he is eternal. Well. Simple people need something to carry them over life's troubles and I've no quarrel if they want to name the unnameable. It gives comfort to have a personal savior and it is good that it aids some in their efforts to surrender to God. But, really, one doesn't need a named deity for surrender. To realize the true nature of the ultimate reality in relation to mundane existence leads to a kind of evenmindedness which is the same as resignation to a God concept.

To reiterate. "Mundane existence itself becomes possible, conceivable, only on the ground of the unconditioned reality." And, "That which is of the nature of coming and going, arising and perishing, in its conditioned (mundane) nature is itself Nirvana in its unconditioned (ultimate) nature...the unconditioned reality is the ground of the conditioned, contingent entities." Therefore it can be said the world of becoming (Samsara) is Nirvana.

But those are just words to be made real, given the universal, cosmic, import they vainly attempt to embody. It is a pretty statement but living it is a different matter altogether. One has to see it with the eye of the Buddha.

There are claimed to be five eyes which this writer finds corresponds with the five Yogic levels of Samadhi. Based on that, the Dharma-Megha-Samadhi of the Yoga practice would correspond to the "eye" of the Buddha, the fifth eye. In Yoga that would be at the level of the ultimate reality characterized as Kaivalya, silence. For Buddhism that would correspond to Nirvana. It is a state in which silence prevails, in which the mind falls away and consciousness alone shines forth. The true nature of all is established in its own right. Determinate reality would no longer be seized as ultimate. The one who goes this way is entirely free from becoming.  The ground of the conditioned is understood as the unconditioned reality. The basic elements of existence are comprehended as not ultimate.

Such an achievement cannot be put into words. Words can be used to point the way, like a finger pointing at the moon, but clinging to the finger prevents actually seeing the moon as clinging to the teaching actually prevents, inhibits, seeing the Real. The best that can be hoped for is to follow the words, the teaching, till a point is reached where it is realized that beyond here is uncharted territory and a leap of faith is needed. That leap is into understanding, or comprehension. A potentiality is realized, created anew, and that latency, manifested renewal, becoming, continues in a new light. Life is continuous renewal which means, basically, that it is the freedom to create. It is taught that the mind, and consciousness, operating through various vehicles operate to satisfy the so called thirst for the Real. As one progresses on this path the vehicles become more and more subtle till only the main instrumentality of consciousness, the mind remains. When that too, by meditation, is compelled to dispel itself, then the last veil covering consciousness itself falls away and the "seer is established in his own right."

To be illuminated in or by consciousness is to borrow, take loan of a conditioned reality and it is mind that operates here. Existence is an attribute for that relative entity, the mind.

Process and simultaneity.

Fire. Each moment of a flame's death is simultaneous with the birth of the next moment of the fire in the continuing process of burning. Fire is a constant renewal involving extinction and rebirth. That is a good metaphor for life. Subsets of simultaneous processes continuously work together to produce the phenomenon. The fire as process rests on top of multitudes of supporting conditions right down through molecular action to the sub-atomic participants of neutrons, protons, electrons and below these the quarks, muons, leptons, neutrinos, the pi-mesons, the higgs boson. The complexity is astonishing and needs to be appreciated when a claim is put forth that something is known or even knowable, or, for that matter even there at all except as an essentially empty shell. Some say, particle physicists, for instance, that without the higgs boson nothing at all of the phenomenal world would have mass. Therefore it is called the God Particle.

One breath, dieing, gives birth to the next. One instance of flame, dieing, gives birth to the next. For fire it happens so quickly that the separate parts are not discernible. Breathing, while following the same principle, is so much slower that the parts are easily discernible. Where does this principle take us? One star, dieing, gives birth to the next. One Universe, dieing, gives birth to the next. How about one God, dieing, gives birth to the next? Or put a bit differently, one Reality (Dharma), dieing, gives birth to the next? Becoming is, it seems, simultaneous birth and death. The way of the ever new follows this principle. For Buddhism this principle conflates into becoming, the elements of which do not really exist as discrete entities. The process has a stronger claim on the Real. Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, in opposition to Heraclitus, asserted something similar when stating reality is one, not many. The "many" therefore cannot be seized, held, owned, defined, bounded. In themselves they are not actual, real. They have no svabhava, self being, you see. Therefore phenomenal reality is illusory and the manifold being empty carries over to the ultimate reality which is itself likewise sunya, empty. Yet the manifested world has relative reality and finds its meaning and purpose in pointing to the substratum from which it, so to speak, borrows its reality as it ever and anon springs forth anew. Effulgence.

In this emanation we find, or try to find, or confirm, or manifest, or realize, ourselves. We have potentialities unknown but we do know the urge to actuate these, to fulfill, to make alive, to realize. If there is a meaning, purpose, to this can it be known or understood? Many have tried and failed. Many have tried and had partial success. The philosophies of the world must be appreciated in this light. Accordingly, a kind of evenmindedness is the most efficacious approach to life to be had. For those who fare the middle way, the way of the Madyamika this is known as non-clinging.

Notable, to this writer at least, one does not find in Buddhism, Hinduism, Yoga the ideas of the ultimate reality conferring on the manifest, particularly sentient life forms, universality, or conversely, embodied beings conferring on the ultimate reality individuality, enabling thereby the substratum, whatever it is in itself, if it is anything at all in itself, the gift of self awareness. Not directly at least is this taught or appreciated in the East, or for that matter in the West, either. My mentor, G.V. Desani, did teach this, saying that the person is the instrumentality of "God's" self knowing. So, we are the means by which the ultimately real has self knowledge, enjoys, experiences itself. And, yes, by the methods of the East you can realize the ultimate but does that make you co-creator? Are we in partnership with the Divine Creative Spirit? Is eternality conferred on man in what would be a hypostatic union? Does, conversely, this relationship confer on the ultimate, individuality? I think it is implied but not necessarily specified in all the spiritual practices if one goes deep enough into the esoterica. For it seems to me that, clearly, in it's ultimate nature, any and all manifestation is essentially identical with the substratum. Therefore a fully self realized individual, Jesus, Buddha, "spark of the divine" is a wholly manifest instance of the ultimate reality. The Word incarnate. Put differently, the ultimate reality, whatever it might be in itself is totally, completely exhausted in the mundane, nothing at all being held back, reserved. So, and the Mahayana of Nagarjuna agree on this point when they express that the world of becoming, Samsara, is when seen from the right perspective, Nirvana. As Edward Conze puts it in his paper The Ontology of the Prajnaparamita "Nirvana and I are absolutely different. I cannot get it, and it cannot get me. I can never find it, because I am no longer there when it is found. It cannot find me, because I am not there to be found. But Nirvana, the everlasting, is there all the time. 'Such-ness is everywhere the same, since all dharmas have already attained Nirvana.'" The ultimate reality is that all of conditioned nature, all of the mundane and/or manifest is illusory. There's no division at all in the ultimate reality. Clinging to anything at all introduces division.

Yet Professor Irwin Lieb's saying that the only true individual is the entire universe, taken all as one, is easy, though, not so much realizing it, acting on it, living it. Jesus and Buddha and others having done so show us the way but we must nevertheless walk that path for ourselves alone. The flame, dieing, gives birth to another. Setting one's self up to be that other is a lovely dream to be realized by extremely rare individuals.

And by emptiness fullness is known, understood. So Samsara, the world of becoming, is not in itself Nirvana, the ultimate reality.Yet neither is it different from that. For to cling to either is to fall into error, what Nagarjuna would name eternalism. The philosophy of Prajnaparamita, the path of the perfection of wisdom, teaches that the tendency to cling, to "reduce the great to our own measure" is a most difficult error to root out. So, from the standpoint of the ultimate reality Samsara might be Nirvana, but only if one realizes it, in a sense, owns what is impossible to own. In other words, without the direct input of a Tathagata, one who goes the way of Buddhahood, it is not actualized, remains potential. So for Samsara to be Nirvana requires input, so to speak, of a sentient life form. One who has this attainment might be said worthy of having co-creator status.

This is a stretch, but thinking outside the box, one might go so far as to say God has gone astray and it is our duty to bring him back to reality. That might be, in part, what it means to be a co-creator. A notion from Rabbinic Judaism is that God having created the world withdrew so as to make room for man. Well, another take on that is that he didn't withdraw at all. He just became so involved in his creation, shall we say, lost in his work? that he forgot his true nature. So, as embodied beings we are tasked with helping him realize same, come back to himself. From another perspective one might say God descends into matter, sleeps there in order to, on awakening, reascend a fully self realized being (Jesus, Buddha) to his own nature as a kind of renewal while at the same time benefiting the people of his creation, reviving their interest in realizing as much as possible their own true nature, this done out of love or compassion. This too gives a sense of what it is for Samsara to be Nirvana; as a means of refreshing a self realized being. What is a sentient life form other than the instrumentality of this renewal?

Involved in matter. This absorption amounts to the loss of true nature. Absorption in an endeavor frees abilities, might be a way of realizing hidden capabilities. Working from the bottom up created man makes of the sacred, individuals, whereas the sacred makes man, immortal and in hand with that it goes without saying that the variety of individuals is endless.

We would know God, the ultimate reality, as a final Thing. It would give us great comfort to have that. But ipso facto this reduces these to mundane reality. These are not like other things we own, have direct access to. Essentially they are unknowable. How can one know that which constantly changes? "Can you put your hand in the same river twice?" I know, it is said by some that God is the same today, yesterday, and forever. But that is defining "him" by man's measure, putting him in a package we can take along with us. In reality he is certainly not different than that but at the same time he is not limited by that either. Finally, one must give up trying to understand and just be resigned to that; in other words one must, in order to be on the right path, simply surrender to God. Silence. Be still. Accept without any imposition at all. If you would be full first become empty.

It is by the manifest that we first apprehend the ultimate reality though when focused on the manifest understanding of the ultimate reality is inhibited to the extent of the clinging thereto. We might be walking down a path and see a snake there but on closer examination realize it is only a rope that our mind mistook for a creature. The snake imagined, still is real in a sense, but not in itself. Only the substratum, the rope, the ultimate reality, is real and the imagined snake has borrowed its reality from that rope and must relinquish it when realized to be an illusion.

Consummation

The Ultimate Reality is the whole Universe as the ground or substratum of all  mundane manifestation, of all divided entities. It is the only true individual on which all else depends. It is the conditio sine qua non, if you will. Its easy and natural to combine, conflate, all that is into one reality completely empty whatsoever. All the divisions of the Universe as a whole are of dependent origination no different, in principle, than the snake in the rope. There is only one thing here and it is that on which all "things" depend for their borrowed existence.

Venkata Ramanan, citing Nagarjuna, writes that when the bodhisattva attains Buddhahood "light emerges from the top of his head." Interesting, I think, to compare that to the Christian Pentecost.

The disciples went into the "upper room", which I think is a metaphor for meditation where one focuses consciousness in the region of the top of the head. There "appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit..."

Ramanan also writes that the Bodhisattva "...realizes the ability to understand the different languages of different kinds of beings and gains also the ability to teach every one in one's own language."

At the Christian Pentecost when the tongues of fire came to rest on the disciples they "...began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim." And "...there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language."

I cite these items because, easily discerned, my purpose is to harmonize the various modes of self realization mankind has practiced.

The final word goes to a scholar, Edward Conze, which is congruent with the thought expressed herein of another scholar, my professor, Irwin Lieb. I am of the opinion that Nagarjuna and the Buddha himself would agree with Conze's statement that "The ontology of the Prajnaparamita is a description of the world as it appears to those whose self is extinct."

 

 

 

Potpourri

My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan

A lyrical mystique pervades in parts that lay skillfully against the march of the beloved infinite regress of efficiency of west world which is given expression in a language that to me treats the object of language as a kind of abstract space or form. The use is correlative to the use of these elements in the visual art of America in the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. Objects are seen to become muddled in each other. Does the arm of this nude end here? Does it matter? The object looses its boundary. Man lives more in the infinite each minute. So? Well, he does it less and less from the standpoint of the finite. One despairs of the body, the medium of existential mass. The sensual genius revels in music as the medium. One such obviously recognizes the absurd and is making in the same movement a grasp for faith. I am here in my body, a finite articulation of the infinite. This is how I find myself fundamentally, the condition without which nothing. This is home.

Concept and culture.
Compare psyche and pneuma, Greek and Latin, animus and spiritus.
In preliterate culture breath (psyche) and life (pneuma) were more or less equivalent, while in literate culture we can speak of these in two senses, one in which they are equal and one where they are not.

The exodus is the mother of the myth of creation. The Jews were brought out of Egypt. The world was brought out of the cosmos, of infinity.

What leads to self realization, the bringing of the absolute to the front of the consciousness, is vibration, frequency, whether visual, audible, or mental; the entering of the state of consciousness returning on itself is inevitably accompanied by the occurrence of a precipitating encounter of the “individual” soul with a certain harmony that, like a rose bears its fragrance, bears the “fragrance” of Ultimate Reality.

Desani, March 14, 1973
Burn the seeds (of deeds) by high Samadhi only. The weakened klesa is stronger than the klesas/passion full blown because its expression is more subtle, harder to root out because they are harder to recognize.

The daemonic urge is the erotic in nature gone wild.
The medium of architecture and sculpture is existential mass.

Jan 30, 1973
My need is too great for anyone to satisfy….Don Juan

The unadulterated spirit is will. Will is power. The urge to go beyond the self, the daemonic urge, or romanticism, is a perversion of this power. Classicism to the extent that it elevates the intellect, or dwells on the distinction that can be made between the power of the mind, rationalism, and mere corporeality, sets up a tendency toward adulteration of the will. The next logical step from classicism is toward romanticism; one is respite for the other, in our history, in my personal life.

The daemonic spirit appeared through the movement of Christianity. Physical attraction, the daemonic urge, being suppressed was instead given prominence, life, perpetuated. What was natural was made evil. What was corrupted was faith, the opportunity for self actualization.

Romanticism – The daemonic spirit, erotic in nature, the sensuous genius of Don Juan, the music of Mozart.
The attempt of the soul to go beyond itself. The urge to see reality as greater than itself. The attributing to God what is properly shared by God/man when properly joined.

Music, absolutely speaking, gives perfect expression to romanticism, the post human force. Music is the most abstract medium.

Sculpture or architecture gives perfect expression to existential mass, pre-human force. It is the most concrete medium and is, as existential mass, the medium of architecture or sculpture. The only substance concrete enough to be worked for these. Music can not be a medium for sculpture.

Language, the word, gives perfect expression to the existential spirit; it is the medium most perfectly suited to express inwardness. The spirit, the void, is the beginning and end of force.

I feel the urge of romanticism, I give it perfect expression by making it into music.

I feel the urge of existential mass, I give it perfect expression by making it into sculpture or architecture.

An expression in language, in thought, is of inwardness. The perfect expression is one that expresses inwardness. Does every expression participate to a degree in this?

By virtue of regress a certain freedom - who can deny complexity which where is now, which time is there, on your beloved papers packed in their particularity, above below, between beyond?

What can I say that will stop the world, reveal the lives? The man centered universe? You expect an answer? You tempt a man who has elephants?

I do not make fun, but play; but loosing my pen my pen my pen the seed is extinguished.

Excited ideas carry away a place where presence in you is eternally presupposed. First meetings where the simplest seeds, just a transparent gaze of eyes into mind falling on most fertile furrows of honest openness where what now grows is rapidly evolving configuration tumbling cataclysmically in and about each other spontaneously like a waterfall of thought and emotion. Like light playing on light in the abyss, ecstatic revelation of the silent blackness behind that common nothingness around which our joined eyes play like solar flares and which alone could support our perpetual falling and simultaneously reflect our faces back and forth to each other in an infinite regress of images metamorphosing into worlds of progressive subtlety till finally I am a mere benumbed butterfly in the winter wind, chasing you, a fallen leaf blown into fluttering enticement.

The path we follow is in a sense the wake of our thoughts and emotions preceding us. This note is a part of that path, a sign post on the way.

“Thinking and the object of thought are the same for you will not find thought apart from being, nor either of them away from utterance.” Parmenides

We are what we seek in an artificial other, yet out of fear, perhaps, of being alone in the universe we are blinded by the nearness of the truth. Yet the thirst for the real is so great that finally all barriers fall as one embraces this last of a thousand demons, loneliness.

Bronowski
Errors can’t be taken out of observation. Stars or atoms; we can’t fix their location, boundaries. There is no scientific certainty. There is no God’s eye view. Errors are bound up in the nature of human knowledge. Fire electrons at atoms of thorium; we see a blurred outline. The act of observation inevitably shapes the observed.

Max Bohm stated that theoretical physics is actually the new philosophy

About 4.5 billion years till the sun dies.

Bodies stopped changing one million years past. Brains stopped changing about 100,000 years ago. Man’s evolution is perhaps in a way a closed chapter. But life itself? Consider that a billion years ago the worm was the most advanced form of life: at some time in the future a form of life will evolve that is a quantum leap above humanity. Perhaps it already is here but hidden.

Heisenberg. No events can be described with certainty.

Plank. The area of uncertainty in the atom is mapped out by the quantum.

It is true that any recognition whatsoever occurs only within certain tolerances. How the mind works. What if the mind is removed?

The theory of uncertainty fixes the fact that knowledge is limited. And understanding? And consciousness?

Measurement is not the same as understanding.

Hiroshima. 6th August, 1945, 8:15 a.m.

More Bronowski. Science does not turn people into unthinking, unfeeling monsters, psychotic invalids. The search for absolutes does. Hitler’s Germany is an example of what happens when people think they have certain knowledge. The scientific art is always on the verge of error and is therefore personal in that the witness sees himself as responsible for eliminating error, or for going further into it.

We must rid ourselves, all humanity, of the itch for absolutes.

Here is what I am perhaps looking to say. I am not so much the person John Hinds as I am a being in the primitive matter of the universe finding articulation through John’s activity. I am his spirit. He lives through me and I through him. It’s a matter of intention, ascending intensities, a continuum; John and his spirit are really one in one projecting simultaneously the universe. What an awesome task. Mind comes to matter to produce consciousness.

To supercharge with possibility sometimes with ambiguity in speech is to violate expectation, to startle, stun, silence. And then you are open, don’t know what to expect so the possibilities are endless. And whatever does happen is complete in and of itself because vulnerability asks for nothing more than what just comes out of each momentary necessity. This is the secret of real manipulation, for instance in advertising, or in the springing of the eternal trap by fear and panic, its eternal components. An exquisite move, whatever the medium (architecture, dance, painting, music, prose, poetry, philosophy) is merely one that provides a moment of surprise which provides what is really the object. Silence. In that openness, vulnerability, the message is given and it goes to the person because he has been stunned into vulnerability, into non-clinging. They have his attention and therefore his intention. Polarities and spin merge to a common purpose.

Ambiguity in speech is poetic. It makes for lightness which makes for uncertainty. There is also repetition, variation, transformation. Variation follows only when expectation is violated. Repetition is what is expected.

The silence, the sweet play of figures.

The wind sometimes blows so hard and so fast here, that it takes on a new meaning. It is fierce, awesome in its power to subdue everything in its way. Yet in the evening as the sun sets and the wind subsides, branches, grasses, dust, and birds respond to subtler forces than the departed winds. The dance continues in a different tone, at a different pace. Orchestration of the infinite.

Medieval world view was world as center of universe and man as center of world. Man was the measure of all things. Faith was depended on for an understanding of God. For Aristotle forms are perceived by the passive mind and abstracted then by active mind to become ideas. Nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses.

Descartes, educated by Jesuits, worked against the medieval scholasticism. Medieval man was in a quagmire as to how he could understand God, the infinite, from his finite view. Because of this quagmire mysticism sprang up to circumvent it. Mysticism does not attempt to explain. Descartes goal was to establish a new order. He was concerned with the real world and real problems.

Cartesian epistemology intends to take man from not knowing to knowing. He struggled against Meno’s paradox that if man is truly ignorant he can not come to knowledge. Descarte's fundamental view of man in the knowing situation is that he starts with reason and many ideas, some true, some false. So it is not a moving from ignorance to knowledge but from confused knowledge to true knowledge. His philosophical task was how to think rightly in the mental journey to truth. He argues that there are some innate ideas from God, the source, and most, from experience through the senses. The method and its task are served previously by custom and habit because they work. The principle criteria was “what works”.

Descartes said, “Because we conceive of a possible state of order, there must be one.” This is why we should be concerned with searching after truth. He thought that realizing disorder is desiring order. Descartes accepts nothing as true which could not clearly be recognized to be so. (Distinct from this, but what occurs is the application of the doctrine of doubt.) He divides difficulties and proceeds from the simple to the complex. His method was mathematical in that he took the complex and divided it into simple parts, proved those, and then reconstructed. In this he has been accused of being reductionist.

Descartes was opposed by the Catholic church as he innocently advocated man’s return to himself for solution to consciousness crisis. If the people turned within for guidance, if he recognized thought over action, his thought, then the church would loose power over the realm of action.

Descartes's method is not meant to find new wealth of knowledge but it is to form the mind and its confused data. He admits that one cannot live by the method. It is only a directional teaching or learning aid. It insists on radical subjectivism. He speaks in terms of “I” and “my mind”. This problem is alleviated by relegating the method first to the realm of thought and when truths are found to the realm of action. He thinks that radical subjectivism is man’s natural state. He must be such to function in society.

Descartes felt that numbers are something more than a mere quantitative metaphor, as the Pythagoreans. To him mathematics was an abstract, fundamental truth and he is fascinated by this in that we can all, eventually, agree on mathematical truths. He adopted this function as a procedure to aid us in coming to an agreement of truth in general and also to avoid the problem of radical subjectivism. He feels that objective means object for thought as it exists in my thought. The objective thought as it exists outside my thought is the “formal reality”. A chair, for instance, is a formal reality while as a chair in my mind it is an object for thought. He sought to establish whether something is indubitable because it is certain or vice versa.

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Something greatly distant engenders a longing to be joined. Bring yourself to this and finally achieve completion, salvation. Said of Christianity and the "Western" experience in General. See Camus, the Myth of Sisyphus, and also Kierkegaard and Sartre.

5/12/02. In this truth is the derivation of the "power" of the evangelicals, the "Imam", the "guru", indeed any teacher whatsoever. They thrive on false dichotomies.

The truth IS, reality is not a process but only seems so. Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, held to this idea. "The real is complete." The value of the "pastor's coin" derives from the opposite idea, that the real is process or, becoming. Salvation, enlightenment, are so much flim flam. Whatever knowledge or truth there is in the cosmos commingles or coexists with all that is and is immediate to any consciousness whatsoever. The task of the acolyte of true knowledge is just to put a handle on the void by the mere means of realization and with just a little twist turn emptiness to fullness. When realized one sees that it was always there - waiting. Nothing has changed yet all is new.

5/4/07. Take neither process nor completion for the absolute. The "real" is both. Completion is process! All process is additive to completion, the whole, the Real.

Yet, absolutes are only to be seized; must avoid clinging to comprehend the Ultimately Real. Buddhist philosophy.