Thoughts on Desani's Series of Articles "Very High and Very Low"

 "The silence of a falling star

lights up a purple sky
and when I wonder where you are
I'm so lonesome I could die."
Hank Williams

"Hello darkness my old friend
I've come to talk with you again..."
Paul Simon

Behold the rising sun - silence. Behold the setting moon - silence. Behold the eyes of your lover - silence. The fragrance of a rose - silence. Silence is that by which anything at all manifests, is intelligible. All phenomena originate in silence and there disappears, thus it is astride graves we give birth*. And Desani writes self-consciousness [is] the imposition of nothing on nothing at all. Ex nihilio nihil fit. (Out of nothing comes nothing.) And he quotes from an unpublished manuscript that "To shrink time into a circle and to be outside the circle" and so to know all, all." God maintains silence so we can speak. True beneficence. Is he sustained by our effort, our brave folly? What is it to him, our trouble, tumult, turmoil, travail? Thunder clouds - lightening - wind - storming renewal, rejuvenation, respite, and new growth. I shake you, jolt-volt you into new life.

In a new post at Desani.net I link to Desani's Very High and Very Low writings. I wanted to make some separate but personal comments about these without 'meddling' with the original. I've tried assimilating here, and in many other places too, the essence of his teaching. Its a fools errand, I know. I quote and summarize him and intersperse my own thinking freely. My efforts amount to nothing. Readers are advised to go to, rely on the source writings here at Todd Katz's Desani.org.

Desani says one must surrender to art. Unpack that. To surrender to art is to be carried away by beauty. The same for Love, Liberty, Wisdom, Truth, any of the concomitants of consciousness. Pursuit - it is so that to intend to achieve the insight of the Buddha, of Jesus too, is a kind of pursuit - of these serves to push them over the horizon, puts them out of reach. It is quite different to have a strong intention. (One realizes along the way that the more you cling to something, a thing, an ideal, the more it slips from your grip. One fails to get water by grasping whereas cupping the hand and receiving that given is the contrasting view.) The same for enlightenment, Nirvana. "There's nothing to be said that can do more for enlightenment than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for seeing the moon." Zen proverb.

Desani writes that the Buddha decried the secrecy surrounding Indian spiritual practices of his time. He also writes that Indian teaching of Yoga and associated practices has degenerated into a for profit business. A Nadi text read to his acolytes in Austin Texas on June 21, 1980 says Desani is a "new [kind of] Yogi in the world". I think he intended to make these spiritual practices freely available, at least more easily accessible, for people. He repeatedly tells of searching far and wide for a particular text or initiation into a technique and now he freely shares that with this audience. (In the "Yellow Text of Theravada Buddhism" he publishes instructions, e.g.) So we benefit from his efforts. He acts on our behalf - the people of the world. Yet, keep in mind he repeatedly says these practices are for the especially initiated, that dangers lie in the path of those who would go it alone, without a qualified teacher. That seems contradictory. Admittedly I'm unaware of how one would have esoteric religious and yoga techniques available generally without bypassing requirements for specialized instruction. Still, one should not expect to pay for instruction from a charlatan that could very well lead to a false, a bad outcome. My best thought is just to do Bhakti yoga, which is 'love of the Lord' and leave the arcane practices to the so-called experts. That was Desani's fall back instruction if you can't find honest and open teaching. If one follows Desani's teachings one at least is aware of the pitfalls, the ubiquitous charlatanism, the lurking evil, and is better equipped to find the narrow path onward. He says that strong intention to do the practice necessary results mysteriously in doors being opened to one. If it is your destiny to find a good teacher, one will appear. Meanwhile lead a moral life. If one surrenders to art, to Beauty, one has largely learned how to surrender to God of which Beauty is one facet along with Love, Truth, the others.

What comes through the 'Very High and Very Low' columns, and profoundly, too, is Desani the philosopher and man of religion and for a bonus, a man of the world. He addresses the main questions of philosophy, theology, and human society which, of course, are not amenable to final answers. He explains why saying that high attainments of the Buddha and Yogis, those like him must, must, be experienced; that language, words, are of this world and share with all else of this world the ultimate result of causing pain and suffering. You can't get to 'heaven' by talking about it. Naturally that applies also to 'enlightenment', nirvana, and such. God might be the 'Word', but that doesn't mean you can talk your way into his grace, or any of the great beings that reside in him, the Lords, Divine Mothers, Devis, and so on.

On pdf page sixty-two I'd point out this gem. Paraphrase. Reality, the word, is a symbol, can't be defined, can be truly and absolutely experienced. Bliss above, beyond all sensing, pure consciousness, the substratum of all attributes yet devoid of any and all (attributes), the entire Presence, and the entire Absence.

Insight: Desani demonstrates again and again his great capacity for learned commentary based on his study and assimilation of ancient Indian writings, thought, religion, philosophy, history, and art. To say his knowledge, and more importantly, his understanding dates back to prehistory, say, at least 5000 years, is an understatement. His genius is to bring this to a focus for his readers in that when he writes something, makes an observation, there is behind that a synthesis of ancient thought and real life experience, plus practiced applications of extreme esoteric methods, rituals, and the like, into a finely cut gem that he presents with his assessment of a situation.

Desani created literature. When he describes in detail his country of origin, the people come alive on the page in all their sordid meanness, greed, their filth, their follies, their triumphs and failures, their beauty, cleverness - all of it is put on display. Yes, its a sordid mess mixed up with high art and beauty and love and hate....in short he shows humanity as it really is. Yet, in the end, he maintains his detachment and with a twist works in great Truths about Reality, Time, Space, Metaphysics and the like. In the end the alert reader having been completely wrung out, is dumped pell mell into profound silence known as Kaivalyam there to deal with it as best possible. Writes that Silence is G_d. Literally. That experiencing Kaivalya as the Buddha did is a kind of death. Further writes that Buddhism is India's greatest export [contribution to the world].

Desani is acutely aware of the problems of the Indian people and freely compares other cultures. He pulls no punches and it comes across clearly that he considers India a third world country badly in need of reform focused on supplying the basic needs of communities beginning with sanitation. He considers the ways of western countries far superior when it comes to sanitation, governance in general, and methods to address problems that arise from explosive population growth.

I doubt there is anyone alive on Earth who is capable of dealing honestly, forthrightly, with the Nadi writings in the way that Desani did. The sad truth is these writings and most of the "world view" therein presented will pass into history unappreciated unless spiritual awareness and growth become ascendant. Consider that Desani.org has been in existence for decades and to my knowledge no one has come forward that has the capacity to appreciate and further Desani's work - other than Mr. Katz himself, of course. People say diamonds, precious stones, life itself as we know it, existing on planets orbiting suns across the galaxy, the cosmos, are rarities. No! What is rare is appreciation for Truth itself, for the Real itself, for those concomitants of consciousness, Love, Beauty, Wisdom, Liberty, Truth, and, finally, for Love of God.

Finally, as I've mentioned several times there is a 'lost' manuscript of Desani's called "Rissala". I am reliably informed that the "Very High and Very Low" columns are a major part of that manuscript.

*Samuel Beckett "Waiting for Godot"

Silence or Kaivalya

 I couldn't be more alone if I were the entire Universe.

One needs a lifetime to let that sink in.

And this: You come before your maker in humility. Satan argues with God. [Is it true that "Israel(ite)" means, translates as, one who does battle with the Deity (G_d)?]

And this: For every flower of love and charity he plants in his neighbor's garden, a loathsome weed will disappear from his own, and so this garden of the gods – Humanity – shall blossom as a rose

It was Plotinus who said man's existence and search for meaning and truth was the "flight of the alone to the alone". This reminds me of a similar line from T.S. Eliot's Little Gidding, "...the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time". So, to be a fully self realized person, it happens, requires a kind of mystical vision, is a mystical union.

The "One" of the ancient Greek Philosophers, of Plato, does not have existence in itself. Rather, it is that from which being emanates and though immanent in the Platonic Forms, necessarily has no separation and thus no being in itself. Being requires separation, requires temporality, requires dimensions. The One is eternal, not temporal, non-dimensional. And, it is not a noun, a thing, a person, a place. It is verbal. Realizing this requires the knower join with the known as knowing itself, again, in a kind of mystical union. [Its not a noun, its a verb.]

Tricky language. Language of poetry and philosophy are similar. They take the Soul to a precipice. You must make the leap....or not.  Afterwards how you got to the jumping off place is irrelevant. All that matters is you took the risk.

Cold, lonely, indifferent. Void. Silence. The Alone. There's "No Exit". That is the dark side. Don't give in to that aspect. Yet, according to Buddhism, realizing "enlightenment" is to achieve the profoundest Silence called Kaivalya or Kaivalyam. This "Silence" can't be explained, must be "experienced" yet is beyond experience. To see an image of the Buddha sitting in meditation gives a hint at the procedure. Words are worthless, an impediment.

But, only when you realize you are already there do you arrive. Mystical union, indeed. The banks of the river widen as you approach the ocean and ultimately embrace that with which they merge. Life is that river. Physical form is like the receding banks, yielding life to its origin.

This type of contemplation is intended, necessary, for us to shed our dualistic nature. It is, of course, seen as nonsense by most. I get that, but the effect is a cessation of our natural tendency to want to grasp, to "own" Truth, Love. Truth is transfigured through Love and Beauty. By Liberation one can see right through Beauty and/or Love to the Real itself, to Truth.

I don't think satori, enlightenment, salvation, nirvana (nibbana) actually  lead to transcendence. The soul does not reach these after an actual journey. They are ours by Faith. Have Faith and "all these things will be added unto you". For these are gifts, not attainments, for those who have found the path of Bhakti, Love of the Lord. It is our sacred duty to simply wait on the Lord.

It is the Flight of the Alone to the Alone.

More on Cultural Epochs

 God descends into matter in order to re-emerge a self realized being. This is transfiguration on a cosmic scale.

Just beyond the fringe of our understanding true faith waits to take us from the sound of silence to the brilliant resonance of God's glory.

Consciousness' refinement from art through religion, science, history and finally philosophy is the process of awakening spirit as it extrudes (extricates or frees or liberates) itself from matter.

______________________

These are the general modes of man's being in the world, mere stages on life's way*. They do exhibit a progression. One merges nicely into the others. They comingle and represent the transfiguration of (inert) matter into self realised consciousness which this writer postulates to be a sufficient meaning and purpose of the whole cosmic activity.

R.G. Collingwood, the original author of this scheme, thought philosophy the natural culmination of the stages. Art, Religion, Science, History are the foundations or building blocks of that over arching structure, a fractalization. That is, each epoch, stage, is a reiteration of its precedent, slightly altered, modified, as in a tree where the twig is a modification of the trunk.

The purpose of Art is beauty and it asks man's first question of the world. Who am I, and why? The purpose of religion is transfiguration. Man is a kind of becoming. The incomplete reaches for an ever distant fulfillment. The purpose of science is the apotheosis of knowledge but science only and ever lacks answers for each answer leads to further questioning. The purpose of History is utopia. So, beauty becomes transfiguration becomes complete knowledge becomes utopia, which these share, always being just over an ever receding horizon.

Philosophy teaches that we stare into the abyss+ - and are surprised to find it stares back with what some would claim is a deathly grimace. That is, the world is strangely bereft of true hope as we are seemingly on our own here.

The biggest mistake is, in the western world, christianity simultaneously embraces and rejects God's covenant with man by misunderstanding man enjoys co-creator status. We own this (world). Were we not given dominion over the earth, according to the christian faith? What this writer has noticed is that christians tend to ruin the present with dreams of the future. Some would call this a sickness unto death*. I ask, since you have this dominion, when are you going to take charge?

This fatal flaw of christian doctrine permeates all subsequent permutations of the epochs and underpins the western culture and is fundamentally why we lurch from crisis to crisis. We increasingly live in chaos because we don't have a valid logic of the universe.

And, there may not even be a fathomable logic, at least not for humans. However, as the opening quotes are meant to illustrate, strip orthodoxy from christianity, or religion in general, and simply live by faith. That is the answer. Purpose and meaning will find you; they are self generating through the mechanism we call life.

Also, as learned through my mentor, G.V. Desani, if you only have one religion you have a partial view of reality. I'd expand on that to say that if you are stuck in one or another mode of being as described here as cultural epochs, you likewise only have a partial view.

We struggle not in vain and reaching one summit we ought all to be gratified there is always on the horizon an even greater mount.
__________________________

+ Friedrich Nietzsche

*Soren Kierkegaard

 

Cultural Epochs

 

There is nothing that can be said that can do more for understanding the full meaning and purpose of life (enlightenment) than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for 'seeing' the moon. Zen proverb

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of man (kings). Proverbs 25:2

You ere if you mistake mere measurement for understanding. Acquarius

Paleolithic man saw the birth of Art. There is a premonition of Religion in all art but it was Neolithic man that saw its emergence. In our own social memory it was the Greeks that brought the epoch of Science into the world. History found its feet a mere century or two ago so the next phase can hardly have begun. The diagram serves to illustrate the phases of man's becoming awareness, some would characterize it as his apotheosis.

Art doesn't, can't articulate that the real is a self manifesting first principle but beauty itself contains this germ. Being itself is a fundamental idea with the power to self manifest. It is potentiality with the power to actualize and the present is a realization or actualization of the past and future which are potentialities. Beauty is the primal element of the noosphere. Of art music lives in the moment but its yearning is for the next moment. It is the essence of restlessness, of finding completion in the infinite regress of the horizon beyond the now. This restlessness characterizes all subsequent modes of being discussed.

The christians generally can't get past their feelings of guilt. Guilt is the father of anger, hatred, self loathing. Salvation is the undoing of guilt through forgiveness, redemption. Guilt is self loathing and makes it difficult if not impossible to achieve blamelessness through self sacrifice, to accept the self as sacred.

Speaking of science, if knowledge is always knowledge of something, then only reason leads to knowledge. All knowledge is through sense perception and memory. Direct knowledge, intuition, noesis, is not based on experience. So, science is strictly material in nature and its main flaw is in the non-material nature of understanding. There is understanding not based on knowledge. Science would never postulate or understand that matter conveys individuality and form universality.

It may be true that the whole is in some sense the same thing repeated endlessly, as Nietzsche is said to have thought. After all, for instance, all words come from the same alphabet yet somehow its possible to infinitely rearrange them in order for the New to constantly emerge. It might be more accurate to say that every instance of the Real is an elaboration of its predecessor or antecedent, similar to fractals.

This scheme is of course the brain child of R.G. Collingwood. His book Speculum Mentis is a beautifully written discourse on the subject. I've written about him several times here. A search of Collingwood results in seven items so I won't link to them. I'm doing this addendum because I wanted to include the above diagram.

What is suggested by the stages is that there is an end within, Aristotle's entelechy. This end within manifests first as Art, then Religion, and so forth. With each stage the end within changes. The artist gives beauty while the religious aims at union with a deity. The scientist works for the most elegant theory, expression of understanding of the world. The idea of history is that by stages the culture of man is perfected over time. The original beauty of artistic expression is still there but has evolved to encompass all that culture entails.

The end within an acorn is, of course, an oak tree. But if you make boards of the oak then the end within the acorn becomes, for instance, a table, among myriad other possibilities. The end within an acorn is also a stump, or fire for the hearth. This is a decent metaphor for the cultural epochs which is our subject here. The oak dreams of the acorn. The acorn dreams of the oak. The stump lives in them both.

Sentient life forms are an end within. Of what is unknowable but some understanding might be possible. What is knowable, I guess, is that it just started [on this planet] and given the expected life span of the sun has 4.5 billion or so "years" to manifest. Who are we, or what? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is our purpose? Meaning? Any certain knowledge of these is not attainable. What is attainable is a gradual revelation of beauty, of truth, of love, of the end within. Cultural Epochs are expressions of the emergence of these qualities. How are we different from a rose in bloom..."such frost white felicity to shame the moon" * . Consider that before the emergence of man, of sentient life forms, beauty, truth, wisdom, liberty, love, did not exist but were in the rocks crying out, as it were. The whole of creation is an aspiration, a yearning, longing, a church spire reaching, a pine pointing, to these concomitants of consciousness to be made explicit.

Plotinus is said to have thought that existence, life, is a flight from the alone to the alone. Alone to alone equals a null. Yet even in this nothing exists flight, flight from one make believe to a somewhat different make believe. Its a journey, a process, so flight is all, totally encompassing, the point of departure being the same as the point of arrival. The Real is not a state, it is a becoming. Every attempt to own it begins from a false premise. One only owns things.

Think of T.S. Eliot: "We shall arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." From Little Gidding

* G.V. Desani wrote this.

Thoughts

  

"Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves. " Churchill

Category error: Every assertion has built in premises, assumptions about the nature of the Real. If the assumption is wrong, then the containing assertion or claim can't be right. In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management. Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means. Our experience, connection to the Real, as embodied, individualized, localized beings is the first of these. Dan Simmons

"This finding adheres to a general pattern that imagining a given action or sensation is likely to be neurologically analogous to physically carrying out that action or experiencing that particular stimulus." Link

"That's why we're here: the passing of time has no meaning unless experienced by conscious beings." James Lileks

…or consciousness, truth, beauty. Time and these are universal but must be individualized, localized to be meaningful.

---

God hides in plain sight. He does not do the things man does, think, etc., but he is (there) when we do them.

Michael Hanlon on theory of "pocket universes" This sounds a lot like Aristotle: "If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. This idea from the Multiverse theory. And from Michael Hanlon on string theory: "The many worlds interpretation of quantum physics….states that all quantum possibilities are, in fact, real. When we roll the dice of quantum mechanics, each possible result comes true in its own parallel timeline. If this sounds mad, consider its main rival: the idea that reality results from the conscious gaze. Things only happen, quantum states only resolve themselves, because we look at them. As Einstein is said to have asked, with some sarcasm, would a sidelong glance by a mouse suffice?"

Me: The north pole can't be definitely located, seen, but we know its there.

Hawking: If Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct, the universe began with a singularity called the big bang. Now because it was a singularity, all the laws of physics broke down. And therefore we cannot predict how the universe began. A few years ago I was at a conference on cosmology that was held in the Vatican. And at the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the Pope. The Pope said it was fine for them to inquire into the early history of the universe, but they should not ask questions about the big bang itself… because that was the work of God. However, at that conference I proposed that Einstein's general theory of relativity would have to be modified to take quantum mechanics into account. And that modification would mean that there was no singularity. Space time would be finite in extent, but with no singularities. In this picture, space time would be like the surface of the earth. It's finite in extent, but it doesn't have any boundary or edge or singularities.

Interviewer: SO IT WOULDN'T BE POSSIBLE TO SAY THAT REALLY THE UNIVERSE HAS A BEGINNING OR END, OR WHAT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO SAY ABOUT BEGINNING AND CAUSATION?

The universe… the universe would have a beginning and an end in the same sense that degrees of latitude have a beginning and an end at the north and south poles respectively. There isn't any point with a latitude 91 degrees north. And similarly, there isn't any point in the universe which is before the big bang. And the, but the north pole is a perfectly regular point of the earth's surface, it's not a singular point. And similarly, I believe that the big bang was a perfectly regular point of space time. And all the laws of physics would hold at the big bang. And if that is the case, we can completely predict the state of the universe from the laws of physics.

ALL OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS SEEMS TO BE DIRECTED TOWARDS THE EVENTUAL GOAL, THAT'S A UNIFIED FIELD THEORY, AN UNDERSTANDING OF FUNDAMENTAL LAWS THAT UNIFY ALL OF NATURE, INCLUDING MANKIND. WILL WE EVER FIND SUCH A THEORY, AND IF SO, WHAT COULD BE THE CONSEQUENCES?

I think it's an open question as to whether we will find a complete unified theory. All I can say is that we don't seem to have one at the moment.

YOU WERE SAYING THAT THERE MAY BE SUCH A THING . . .

We may never find a complete unified theory, but I think that there is a 50-50 chance that we'll do so by the end of the century.

WHAT WOULD BE THE CONSEQUENCES OF SUCH A THEORY? WOULD WE THEN KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT PHYSICAL REALITY?

In principle, but not in practice. Because the equations are very difficult to solve in any but the simplest situations. We already know the laws of physics that underlie the behaviour of matter in normal circumstances. So in principle, we should be able to predict all of physics, all of chemistry and biology. But we've not had much success in predicting human behaviour from mathematical equations.

---

My commentary: Science posits the Real, the source of meaning and purpose, in an absolute other. It's over the horizon and is called something like "complete unified theory" and would resolve the general theory of relativity with the (theories of) quantum mechanics, the physics of the very large with that of the very small. There are no concrete objects, but waves in force fields. Every discovery leads to new postulates as the absolute other is approached but never quite reached. Like going the speed of light requires ever more energy as one approaches light speed, to make the final leap requires all the known energy in the universe. I postulate that to calculate the grand unified theory similarly requires ever greater calculus and that eventually you run out of calculus coincidentally at the same moment you reach the ultimate theory. Ironically the evidence can't be finally owned because it hides in plain sight. You can't find it because the premise you don't already have it is false.

What's interesting is the notion that if its possible it will eventuate. Aristotle postulated this, too, and noted that unimaginable horrors were necessary conditions. Also notable is the absence of anything not quantifiable from these types of proceedings. Sean Carroll, for instance, dismisses philosophical insights relating to consciousness, the soul, and religious notions of transfiguration, for instance, as flowery speech. Science generally doesn't consider anything that can't be measured. Thus measurement becomes the sine qua non of knowledge. But knowledge isn't the only path to understanding. Indeed it can be an impediment. It seems to me a grand unified theory would actually account for time, beauty, love, truth, and such coming to have meaning when actualized in a field of consciousness of a sentient life form. My personal grand notion, call it theory if you want, is consciousness is the instrument of the soul and the issue of Grace working through the emotions, through mind, to affect the apotheosis of matter.

If that's too much to swallow then here is a simpe formula that is known to work: "Praise no day until evening, no wife until buried, no sword until tested, no maid until bedded, no ice until crossed, no ale until drunk."

Is it really cold empty nothingness? When we "Gaze steadfastly at stars which though distant are yet present to the mind" do we bring the star to the mind or realize the star where it is as already in "our" mind? I've lost my note on who first made this observation though Parmenides made a similar statement. Another interesting notion in this regard is from quantum physics, reality results from the conscious gaze. I'd suggest James Lileks has it right when he says "Thats why we're here: the passing of time has no meaning unless experienced by conscious beings." Replace "time" with space, or for that matter beauty, truth, love, God, or, The Whole Universe, and we might realize we confer individuality on much more than just this body in which we find ourselves. The Universe might consist mostly of the void which, as Nietzsche sagely observed, begins to stare back at those pondering, at length, its depths, but its an interesting void.

Ponder the incomprehensible Otherness of the opposite...
woe has its wisdom, sorrow enlightens the soul.

We are all Don Giovanni

 

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Vol. I

The overture begins with certain deep, earnest, uniform notes. Then we hear for the first time, infinitely far away, a hint which yet, as if it had come too early, is instantly recalled, until later one hears again and again, bolder and bolder, louder and louder, that voice, which first subtly and coyly, and not without anxiety slipped in, but could not force its way through. Sometimes in nature one sees the horizon thus heavy and lowering; too heavy to support itself, it rests upon the earth, and hides everything in the blackness of night; a single hollow rumble is heard, not yet in movement, but a deep muttering within itself-then one sees at the farthest limit of the heavens, remote on the horizon, a flash; swiftly it runs along the earth, and is instantly gone. But soon it comes again, it grows stronger; for a moment it lights up the whole heaven with its flame, in the next the horizon seems darker than ever, but more swiftly, even more fiery it blazes up; it is as if the darkness itself had lost its tranquility and was coming into movement. As the eye in this first flash suspects a conflagration, so the ear in that dying strain of the violin has a foreboding of the whole intensity of passion. There is apprehension in that flash, it is as if it were born in anxiety in the deep darkness-such is Don Juan's life. There is dread in him, but this dread is his energy. It is not a subjectively reflected dread, it is a substantial dread. We do not have in the overture-what we commonly say without realizing what we say-despair. Don Juan's life is not despair; but it is a whole power of sensuousness, which is born in dread, and Don Juan himself is this dread, but this dread is precisely the daemonic joy of life. When Mozart has thus brought Don Juan into existence, then his life is developed for us in the dancing tones of the violin in which he lightly, casually hastens forward over the abyss. When one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it ceases to skip, it instantly sinks down into the depths; so Don Juan dances over the abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.

_______________________________

Dread is our energy. It is substantial dread. Despair is not what we feel it is our life powered by sensuousness born in dread. Our joy of life is the daemonic joy of life hastening over the abyss. On cessation we sink into the depths our joy not even a bright memory.

This is the gift of Christianity positing, as it does, personal fulfillment on an ever receding horizon infinitely removed from who we really are.

 

Without memory there is no Real.

Move to Word Press

To be found at Tackingintothewind.net. Can also be found here, in web archive (way back machine)

Update April 2, 2022. I'm going to keep this active because problems with Wordpress. For time being sites will mirror each other.

Note on Epistemology

We're not supposed to know. Its a blessing that we don't. By Grace we are protected from knowing. Bliss depends on this. Such knowing that we would live our lives in its discovery vanishes the moment it is grasped. Because. Knowledge presumes object(s). What if there are no objects? Is knowledge always knowledge of? Grasping and knowing are similar. The desire to own. My knowledge! Certainty. Attraction. Who is the knower? The known? Are they the same? How to dissolve this clinging...

Discovery is the action of the unknown. The less you know the more you create.

Recent untitled poem

The rite of spring
riot of blooms
rout of cold winds, winter's bane
shivering bones
clattering in dismal dungeons dark

Violets are gone now
and iris and lily
bluebonnets take the stage
peerless blue to shame a cloudless sky

Pretty pink primrose too
takes the eye and
pink petal's secret promise folds
virgin thighs' blissful path

See me touch me
feel me smell me
please don't pick me
let me cast seed and wither and die

I'll be here every spring
past winter's baleful fling
and if you fail to come again
my bloom our last visit will ever contain

Of all I am the flowering sum
Pinnacle of the past
nadir of the future
purpose centered everywhere bounded nowhere

John Hinds
2017

Ping!

The Jewish sages of antiquity maintained that God deliberately left creation incomplete so that humanity could become God's partner in finishing the work of creation. (.pdf)

David Goldman

History, Culture, Language, and Ethos

The Real takes shape in memory alone.

Marcel Proust

We are only individuals at present and the only real individual is the One, all that is. Our actions are only apparently real. Nothing really happens. Our actions are caused by the whole of things, not really by our will. Therefore, only the One is an individual.

Irwin Lieb

“Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them?”And God said unto Moses, “I AM That I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” 

Exodus 3

Proust wrote that in his monumental Remembrance of Things Past. It has always struck me as a profound observation and when I recently ran across a note from years ago it immediately came back into focus.

The note was that in getting a culture - language, ethos, that is - we get a past, we make it explicit. This is the common cultural, historical past.

That was from Irwin Lieb. We were studying R.G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (Map of Knowledge). I've written here before about Collingwood and return often to contemplate his contribution to my contemplative life.

Plato observed that in thought we are always going "up" to principles, or "down" from them. Thought somehow puts one in touch with a higher order of things, a height from which we can enjoy a broader perspective. Socrates, Plato's teacher, said the unexamined life is not worth living, it stunts one's growth. But a life of thought is a life of reasoning writ large. The "Good" of Plato is the principle to be found in an examined life - the life of reason or thought. It is the bringing together of ideas and forming a synthesis of them.

We are considering history - memory, in Proust's language, and its contribution to man's place in the world, to his finding meaning and purpose. Language and culture exist because we have a past and the past exists because we have ideas or thought or reasons that give it shape. Without language we have no thought and no past or history. You see the synergy?

Collingwood postulated that history was one stage of being in the world. He taught us that art, religion, science, and history were part of a dialectic process, one being the foundation of the next in an emergence from primitive to refined modes of being of sentient life. It is said that because ignorance is bliss the artist can lead a full life. That is because art asks questions about the real for which it expects no answer. It lacks even the self awareness, consciousness, to understand its efforts to be questions about reality. Religion at least attains a level of self awareness where wonder about the nature of the world is seen as questions about existence itself. And science takes the next step but instead of positing answers in an absolute other as in the religious mode, it abstracts meaning and purpose as insubstantial, not concrete. It denies historicity by its very nature. Its abstraction leaves it without a basis in concrete reality to which we can relate. It thereby becomes uninteresting, unrevealing, and looses its relevance when it comes to the task of finding meaning and purpose.

In the particular there is buried generality (universality) we want to bring out. When it is extracted science is speaking of hypothetical if universal judgments. The language of science is mathematics which is closely akin to music. Is there a more abstract medium than music? Now, the medium of architecture, for instance, is existential mass. Language, the word, is closer to that substantiality. We can live by words. They can be grasped. They're concrete, to make a pun. Mathematics, science, art, and religion, inform that life, enrich it, but without language the whole edifice crumbles into oblivion.

Having a memory of the past engages man in real existence. Whether that is something that persists is debatable. Likely it is as ephemeral - and maybe entirely an illusion - as the fleeting moment. But we can talk about the past, our history, and at least we seem to have the capacity to hold onto memories even if we can't hold onto the instance out of which those memories forever flow into the reservoir of history. We desire a complete synthesis, a safe haven from tumult and its turmoil and trouble. But that ever escapes our grasp. We, while born astride our own graves, are given a glimpse of light during our plunge back into darkness. This brief yet precious beyond understanding moment is an instance of the Cosmos seeing into its very own nature. Take heart that we humans, all sentient life everywhere in the Universe, are the agency by which Reality, Existence itself - God, if you like - has self awareness. The world realizes itself through you and me and all like us. So, of course it is never ending, never complete, always escaping us on a distant horizon. Its somehow comforting, therefore, that the only real individual is the One.

Biblically speaking, God becomes an individual when the Word is made flesh, taking the form of Jesus the Christ. Accordingly, the thoughts expressed here bestow that same status on every sentient life form anywhere. "I am" sent Moses. "I am" sends All.

"G_d" is not a noun. Rather, "he's" a verb. I am, you are, he, she, it IS. When he says I am sends you he is also saying, without being rude, don't ask foolish questions. It's obvious who I am and if you have to ask, well, I'm sorry, but you wouldn't understand.

In memory of Judy Heckert Woehr

     Apotheosis

Black scape
Occupies space
on my wall
In my head
a door which is
itself
a doorless room
the mysterious whole
mysterious severed parts
come together
to hold nothing
but itself.
Tangibility
In my head - ideas
images
seethe around
it's black edges
compelling me
to turn away.
I think of structures
their particular
rhythm
of destruction and renewal -
An apogee of atoms
tightly contained here
as a moment is held
solid it time
and at the last
totally grasped.

    Barbara Sturgell
    February, 1973, Austin, Texas

    In response to a piece of art I created, an assemblage named Apotheosis

Lovers

     My excited ideas carry me away to a place where my presence in you is eternally presupposed, where we first met, where the simplest of seeds, just a transparent offering of your eyes into mine - moist fecund penetration of shameless desire and receptiveness, took root. And what grows now in this ground through our common experience is a yet young growth seen through rapidly evolving configurations tumbling cataclysmicly in turmoil about each other in a kind of spontaneity, like an ever changing yet never changing waterfall of thought and emotional textures, like light playing on light in the abyss, like colliding stars; ecstatic revelations of the silent blackness behind that common nothingness around which our gazing into each others eyes plays like solar flares, and which alone could support my perpetual falling, falling, falling, falling, and simultaneously reflect, reflect, reflect, reflect, our faces back and forth to each other in an infinite regress of images metamorphosing into worlds of subtlety in infinite regress.

     Finally, hovering on the abyss, I am just a benumbed butterfly in the winter wind, chasing you, a fallen leaf blown into a fluttering enticement.

     Potentiality is to actuality as meaning is to purpose as love is to joining. As you are to me as I am to you. We are the same, only the perspective is different. I confer individuality. You confer universality.

Midnight Contemplation

     The world is not what we perceive. (Through the five senses) These are devices to awaken us to the world. The world is what we know it to be through direct knowledge, noesis, intuition. So Merleau-Ponty was not quite right. Neither is the world a (17th century) machine. It is a mind, or, rather, a soul. Your atheist, but not so much your agnostic - he might be considered to be a sceptic - is stuck in the 17th century mind set of Newtonian physics of the mechanistic universe.

     The false dichotomies of the mechanistic world view are a product of the reasoning mind. We have learned that matter is to be contrasted with non matter. A more subtle view is that matter is that which is superimposed by form. Matter is a kind of universality - its more or less evenly distributed throughout space while form confers individuality on matter. The many confer individuality on the one while the one confers universality on the many. Universality is closely associated with intuition and through intuition to faith and understanding. Form is closely associated with reason and through reason to knowledge. We seek to define the universal in terms of the form, specifically, our own form. It was Heraclitus that said man is the measure of all things. This is a bug not a feature.

     The world is not what we perceive. Neither is the truth what we make of it. But this doesn't mean there is no objective truth. The world is grounded in reality. Its just that the truth, in itself, is unknowable. Only in its particulars is it continuously and endlessly revealed while never being exhausted. The proliferation of red roses never uses up all the red. This is why knowledge always fails. You can't own the truth. Red roses participate with redness but don't use it all up. This also serves to explain why every moment of mind is a reiteration of self, soul. And in turn it follows that it is not true there is no abiding soul as the Buddha is reported to have claimed. Redness is there for the next iteration of a red rose for infinity.

     Confusion about this makes it seem we are free to make our own truth, but really, that we seem to find the truth we look for is something of an illusion. There are boundaries. Moral truth is real. Its just that it can't be exhausted - like the red of the rose. Its not a thing in itself, and neither is God. We find God through faith. That is also how we find moral truth. You can say that reality is what we think it is but that is an error. It is measuring the universal in terms of the particular. And, another thing to consider about a moral compass is not so much that you can see where you are going but rather you know where you are coming from.

     God confers on man universality. Man confers on God, individuality. Put another way, God confers on man eternality, everlasting life. Man confers on God temporality. The sun, the planets follow this same scheme writ large.

     To summarize, its not about finding the one true answer to life's profoundest questions. They simply are not there. Rather focus on the search for the answer, the ultimate truth. As Kierkegaard put it, life is a mystery to live not to discover. You can't own it but, better yet, you are permitted to endlessly seek it out. Its much easier to drink from a pool with cupped rather than grasping hands. And, honor, duty, courage, devotion, love, truth, wisdom, understanding, faith, beauty, and liberty are to sentient life forms everywhere what red is to the rose.

     The moon is high in the night sky, almost full. But the silence of this night outshines her lovely face. Contemplate "nothing said can do more for enlightenment than what a finger pointing at the moon can do for seeing the moon." 

Christian Superstition

     Fundamentalist Christians are not grounded in reality, or the real they are grounded in is based on a falsehood, a false dichotomy. Their sense of self, self identification is dissipated in passion, perpetual vanishing. The ritual entering of sensuous based, delimited, defined trance, is going repeatedly to a feeling characterized by guilt, dread, fear, awe, selflessness. They claim faith abut they have its opposite, dread.

     Feeling is material based. The daemonic is material based. They intend to love "God" but do they? Is the trance a surrogate for the divine and thus is it not true that they in reality unknowingly worship evil? 

     Music, likewise, is a perpetual vanishing. So one could say their worship is somewhat musical.

     Music has no meaning. Rather it is an escape from meaning. The meaning is lost to feeling; feeling comes to constitute the whole of the Real as forever discarnate, disappearing on its appearance, ephemeral and a perpetual vanishing. It can't be held and therefore is impossible to truly affirm. It is essentially empty, a void, a surd. Evil is that. Void of meaning, purpose is that. Mere material is that.

     So, for the simple person, is there a true path to the divine? Yes, and it is essentially characterized by humility. For Christians of the kind I am thinking egotistically claim they have the secret to truth. Doubt is alien to them but doubt is a secret of the truth, in a sense, because one can never hold the truth, hold God as his very own.  Longing for rapture, union with the divine in a separate heaven to be carried away from this life to permanent bliss, joy, relief from the bonds of the flesh and joining with an eternal spirit are characteristics of their false dichotomy of spirit and matter.

     If one would take a drink from the fountain he doesn't reach in and grasp the water. He cups his hands to receive it.

Seed Extinguished

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

Irwin Lieb, R. G. Collingwood, William Poteat, Soren Kierkegaard*

David Goldman

America’s journey is the Christian pilgrimage that cannot end with an earthly goal. Thus, Huckleberry Finn is an exemplar of Christian literature as much as is The Pilgrim’s Progress. The journey is motivated not by the destination but by the restlessness of the pilgrim. There is only one possible conclusion to Huck’s adventure: His journey must resume, as he announces in the book’s last line: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

     To the ancient Greek a person can come to know reality, meaning, the Real is finite. To the ancient Hebrew and Christian a person can never know reality because it is essentially unsearchable. Created beings can never fathom the divine will. This comports with the old Hebrew idea that Gods' name is unpronounceable - being vowels only - Yod He Vav He rendered in Latin as YHVH. It also is more a verb than a noun. The doctrines in the Qabala are precursors of Christian orthodoxy. So, even though unknowable in 'this' life, the fruit of ascending to heaven is full revelation of the Real in the after life. Here, below, we must live by grace. Put another way, for the Hebrew/Christian, the full truth about reality is in a separate realm accessible only when certain conditions are met in the death of the individual. Is this not prideful of man to think by the grace of god that what is in essence a man generated account of the ultimate workings of the cosmos have been revealed only to him?

     Hubris is to make the world over to one's own design, to shape the cosmos to one's own purpose. It is of impiety. It is tampering with the cosmos. Another essentially Greek idea.

     For the Greek the cosmos is finite and orderly; its meaning can be grasped for the real itself is finite, a thing in itself. For the Hebrew and Christian it is governed by divine will. But neither account for Don Juanism, that is, restlessness, tumult, infinity. So, how, then, does Christianity posit spiritually qualified sensuousness? It is an outgrowth of the idea that it will be fully available in the future, when one passes into the after life. So, it exists for us on the horizon, hovering there like a jewel, attractive, beautiful, infinitely fulfilling. We want that, live, race towards that fulfillment. It becomes an object of longing which keeps us from fully attending to our life in the flesh, and really, we come to despise our supposed limitations as embodied creatures. Remember, to the Hebrew reality is equivocally manifest in appearances, that is, it is not exhausted while the Greek view is that reality is wholly manifest in appearances; it is exhausted, there not being a supra-real.

     So, "As principle, power,....it is Christianity that first posited sensuousness into the world." (Kierkegaard) Western sensibility can best be understood if looked at in this light. As principle, arché (from or in the beginning), sensuousness was first posited by Christianity, and this is opposed by the Hebrew davar, meaning word, or speech. The Greeks thought the cosmos finite and equivalent and that logos and psyche inform reality throughout. The Hebraic universe is orderly because God would not deceive us; he is bona fide, as Descartes put it. For Christianity, God informs reality, creating it anew each moment. For Greeks, logos, psyche, cosmos inform reality by being, becoming, or keeping reality. The word of God is not reality, not divine, not any more than our words are us. Logos is the real, and it hides behind appearances. God is faithful, but unsearchable; his being is not exhausted in his deeds. Neither is ours. We are complete only in an ever disappearing event on an ever receding horizon. Gratification of the senses supplants having this future completion; we're deprived of being whole so the unfillable void in us becomes a daemonic urge - Don Juanism. Satiety ever escapes us remaining forever unachievable like that point of being fully real in an ever disappearing future event.

     The historical corollary is the Israelites being 'brought' out of Egyptian bondage. Likewise the world, in the biblical account, was 'brought' out of the void. This pattern repeats when, we will be, in the fullness of time - upon the perfect realization of creation - 'brought' out of this world, apocalyptically, and into heaven and into complete, whole eternal beings with perfect incorruptible bodies.

     Kierkegaard, through his "Author A" states that Christianity posits sensuousness as its own opposition in that the spirit sees the ego as separate and evil. "Beware of worldly things, the 'ways' of the flesh." So not only is man irrevocably incomplete, he is self loathing, which feeds the daemonic urge adding or enhancing his restless tumultuous race to infinity. Poteat thought, along with Kierkegaard that in the music of the opera Don Giovanni, Mozart actually expressed in sound this restless urge. In Christianity and Don Juanism the sensuous is not related to the "senses" so much as to a kind of spirit. It is a discarnate sensuousness. Coming to dwell in this feeling is an elevation or transfiguration of the sensuous out of the body to the level of a spirit. This is the birth of the daemonic. The daemonic prevents us from having proper reverence for the absolute other, if, indeed there is that - I don't think so - and leads us on a blind path searching a universal culmination of the restlessness, tumult, the erroneous sense of infinity that is its heritage. We literally and forever teeter on history's brink ever racing to a disappearing point on the horizon the sense of being complete in ourselves, the sense of wholeness impossible to reach.

     This is a most abstract idea and has a minimum of bearing on me as I am in the world and which thus tends to take me out of the world. The most abstract medium is the medium which makes a minimum of reference to man as a spatial temporal creature and which thus tends to take him out of his being in the world. Put another way it is an escape from what is to what might be. Don Juanism, in one sense the erotic in nature gone wild, was sprouted from the seed of the insane drive to achieve salvation, personal completeness, only by union with an absolute other in a reality disconnected from life.

     There is no cure for this malady unless it might be complete annihilation, which seems to be where we are headed. Western man has morphed into a creature that is permanently estranged from himself and reality.

A Zen Moment

Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.

The Heart Sutra

When I say something is done in a void, I mean the doing constitutes the entire universe. I write; the whole world writes. I am the world, there is nothing else. The world is nothing but the writing at that moment.

     The Buddha is reported to have said there is no abiding reality. Thus "you drink from an empty cup and listen to the sound of one hand clapping."

     How best to cope with estrangement from reality.

     Alienation is a mode of experience in which the person is estranged from himself and/or reality. To the existentialist life is a project to end this estrangement. From the ancients to Hegel the philosophical task was to find the universal essence, the immutableness of being - key Buddha's statement. Hegel was the last of this trend. Kierkegaard rejected this classical notion that man should seek universal essence objectively (Heaven) asserting that it should be found subjectively, within man  himself.

     If there is no abiding Real then whatever fills the moment becomes realities' surrogate.

     Does this mean that everything is permitted? Perhaps. Is the boundary condition only that there is no boundary? If there is no abiding reality on what basis is there morality?

     Plato uses Beauty to describe a way out of this conundrum. We can come to understand what is really going on here by realizing that we actually "see right through beauty, past the object, to the real itself." The Buddha, of course, is right. Were there an abiding reality then it would take on the characteristics of a material object. We need to understand that though it is indefinable, unknowable, unfathomable, the abiding reality is there, just not in a way sentient life forms can grasp. One cannot grasp, hold, own, Beauty, Truth, Moral Justice. A kind of Ontological Undecidability (Kelly Ross) is the result.

     Though unknowable we yet participate in the Real. And, since Faith is, at least I think so, a facet of the same Divinity as Beauty, the we might see right through Faith to to God 'himself'.

     And, finally, the Buddha's saying there is not an abiding reality is tantamount to saying there is no God which is what Soren Kierkegaard said, though he added salient context. God Does not Exist. He is Eternal. To me that is beautiful beyond words - we see right through the thought to Reality itself. God is not - because material existence doesn't pertain.

     An abiding Real is not, because material existence does not pertain.

Subject/Object

We are not the subject of the Real.  We are the object.  Its not what.  It's who.  The subject is material, the object, spiritual.  Also, the Real is what we perceive. (Merleau-Ponty)  That's good enough.  Question not whether It is Real.  Whether it is an ephemera, a dream, matters not.  It's the hand we've been dealt.

Neither must one go through guilt to reach salvation. Heaven is within; its not a destination. This place we find ourselves actually is the promised land of the Bible. To become self-centered is the essence of the Christian fall from grace. Adam and Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit is a metaphor for this. It represents the move from living in the spirit to living in the material, to identify with the body instead of the spirit. From there we tend to project our being as an object onto the whole of reality. So reason pertains only to the material aspect, principle. When Pascal said "The heart has its reasons which reason can never understand." he is saying the heart is the faculty of spirit. Clearly he places the heart above. Spirit over matter.

The subject of the Real is the soul, the person as a self-realizing spirit, and the role of the material in this play is as a mere facilitator -  it is the mechanism whereby the soul grows its self knowledge and more importantly, understanding. The emergence of Religion and Science in the forms they have taken are based on the person identifying not with the spirit but with his material side. Religion posits the source of Truth in an absolute other, material other - God as a thing (among things). It then places that material object on an ever receding horizon and sets man up to eternally chase after it, forever to end his longing in frustration. Science, similarly, posits the source of Truth in mere measurement - which is always measurement of 'something', a material object, again, on an ever receding horizon. It eternally reformulates its measurements to ostensibly close in on a final grand unifying theory.

Ultimately, these are infinite regresses of effort by man to define his material self in a spiritual world, doomed to failure. The more you cling to the Real, the more it slips from your grasp. How can one own Beauty? Truth? Its easier to own something like the color Red. Meaning, we chase after qualities of the Real hoping that we can fill the void at our center that is best filled with understanding that discovery is the action of the unknown, the unknowable.

Soren Kierkegaard: "Life is a mystery to live, not a mystery to solve."

Night Baseball (redux)

     NIGHT BASEBALL

Halo of light.
Small figures,
Moving mundane ritual.
Crickets chirrup.
Bats c r r a c k!

Gene pools encounter
In self predatory embrace
Of pedagogue time's
Geologically
Choreographed cascade
Of tumult tormented evolutes
Chained
In perpetual awakening
To combat and
Death.

    April 27, 1991



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    The voice of the void:  "Alive, I can't die; Dead, I can't be born."

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