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I spend a lot of time on an old rug spread out in a field of high grass. When I sit in this place, as I am doing now, the tops of seed heavy stalks, the white domes of the dandelions and the stubborn thistles bend and roll in waves. What is the grass a friend of mind asked once in a poem. I find this a particularly beautiful question, for "the grass" is both one blade and the whole meadow forest. One could just as easily ask what is the forest, but linguistically it would not capture so precisely the essence of the thing, for there is nothing that makes apparent unity of presence quite like a field of grass responding to the wind.
Freedom is not so much about choice but expression. What is the grass? Of its own nature, it grows. The grass is true to what it is, expresses the perfect harmony of relation which exists where it has grown; the cells and stalks, the seeds and wetness of the grass, of its meadow, is the living emergence of its being-in-relation, true to itself and its nature in this particular spot and this particular moment in time. If we did nothing here, the grass would become a bramble of blackberries, and eventually a hemlock forest might arise and stand, its trees growing covered in moss and ferns, and one day it might be cut down by fire or soaked in ash, and all these things would be absolutely true to themselves, to their natures, and this is, I think, the kind of perfect freedom that is what "nature," as we like to call it, ultimately is.
If we were to know what the grass is, and how it is, and why it is, it would be clear that the grass could be no other way. What continues to astound me is that the grass is at all, that from nothing we have everything. For we seem to function in a world in which we have a lot of "things"--or our concepts, which we use to identify and classify the "things" that are. But I find that in thinking this way, there is also an implicit suggestion of other "things" that aren't. For where there are things, there are also not-things. But if things are, then these not-things also are, for if they were not, how could any-thing be? How could we know what a thing is without having a way of identifying what is no-thing.
We might say that what is nothing presents the potential for all being, but also, that what exists express that nothing from which it comes, and in a sense, which it also is. The absence of a thing--the nothing--is in this way not any more or less real than a thing itself.
There is a problem I feel with conceptual thought in this manner, when it comes to expressing and understanding being and non-being, for it is driven, by necessity, to make a distinction between the two. But both being and non-being seem to be two forms or expressions of a deeper principle, which inheres in both, but neither is nor isn't.
That something is what something is inheres only in the passing of its form. Perhaps this is what we feel in that quality of transience, which allows something to be beautiful and alive.
It is only "here" or "not here" when we place a box around it with our minds, enclose it in a conceptual structure that delineates its bounds and defines where and how and when its being "is" and where and how and when its being "isn't." Thing and nothing, being and no-being, is the most basic way in which we navigate our experience via concept. But understand that this is an imposition, and an important one at that, for it has arisen and lives in the world as everything else does, but it is no more or less true than anything else is.
The term non-dualism helps to capture a kind of artifice in this conceptual schism. It is not that "is" and "isn't" or "thing" and "nothing" are not real to the world, but that they are both manifest qualities of a deeper quality, which must be impossible to name or even speak of directly because any attempt to conceive of it leads to this problem of nothing and everything, of "is" and "isn't." I find "emptiness" to be the most apt metaphor in this case, provided we sense that perfect emptiness and perfect fullness express the same principle. But it is much easier to see it via the negative attribute, because we can more easily feel that as the ground of all creative arising.
This unnamable principle of nature which neither is nor isn't gives structure and harmony to the world and affords grace to everything that arises. It seems that as the boundaries of concept-defining-form are expanded, the taxonomies of what things are, and what they are not; of where things are, and where they are not; or even that things are or are not, becomes less important in the deepest ways in which we sense our lives. What is seems more like the arising and dissolving manifestations of the underlying principle that neither is nor isn't.
Of course, we cannot move through life and survive without holding concepts to distinguish and define from and structure--nor should we! For that is why our concepts exist in the first place. But to recognize that these to are but arisings, and can be altered, made more open to the world around us, which is, all of it, our body and our mind, and of which, in present, we are.
THE EMPTINESS OF MY DISPOSITION AND THE POETICS “OF HOPEFUL
THE EMPTINESS OF MY DISPOSITION AND THE POETICS “OF HOPEFUL GREEN STUFF WOVEN”: REPONSE TO NOAH’S `WHAT IS THE GRASS?’
I have this interesting image in my mind of Walt Whitman (“What is the grass?”), Nagarjuna (“What is Emptiness?”) and, let’s say, a modern poet, Galway Kinnell (“What is poetry?”) all sitting around on Noah’s old rug in a field of high grass. They are gathered to share some thoughts with Noah about his meditations on grass. It is at first a perceptual contemplation, the springtime breeze motioning the tall grass and wildflowers a white and lavender speckled green wave. In the sweet silence a blade of grass stays as the object of meditation, at once, to analyze its empty nature, but also to remind the meditator that grass is an ordinary object in an ordinary life shifting through impermanence like all phenomena. And so, this and all blades of grass are objects of teaching to remind and make familiar to us, the subjects, but also objects of meditation, that life, nature, all phenomena, and we humans being in the ordinary world are, as we are, empty of independent, permanent existence.
In Walt Whitman’s `Songs of Myself,” a child asks, “What is the grass?” and Whitman responds,
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
This canto is what might be described as “catalogue verse” and reflective of Whitman’s affinity with the Old Testament and its didactic and even mnemonic style. I mention this because, when conveying spiritual truths like emptiness, as Noah so beautiful explores, there is an inherent teaching that occurs. As Noah observes,
“I find this a particularly beautiful question [What is the grass?], for "the grass" is both one blade and the whole meadow forest. One could just as easily ask what is the forest, but linguistically it would not capture so precisely the essence of the thing, for there is nothing that makes apparent unity of presence quite like a field of grass responding to the wind.”
Whitman, in his poetic expansiveness, makes the point that the grass the child “fetches with full hands” is what it is, but is also more and less than the sum of what it is. That is, it is empty of independent existence. Whitman challenges the idea that language fails to capture what Noah calls the “essence of the thing.” In fact, Whitman privileges language as both a practical and ideal vehicle for achieving Noah’s direct experience of the “unity of presence” that all phenomena ultimate are. You see, language is a kind of primordial paradox in that its originary form leaps out of consciousness as if Janus-faced: like the god of Roman myth, language is the portal of temporality, of beginnings and endings; and thus within the tension of time, in the pointing beyond time, as well. No doubt, for Noah to “capture so precisely the essence of the thing,” he first needed language to construct the very essence he can now capture.
But, why do we idealize nature as if it transcends language instead of the other way around? Nature predated language. Language emerged from nature and therefore includes nature in its consciousness. But, nature, evolutionarily speaking, cannot include language. Like nature, language has a pristine beauty, too. In its pure intention, language also “expresses the perfect harmony of relation which exists where it has grown”: in the cells, stalks, and seeds of its reaching out for relation, much like the grass’s “living emergence of its being-in-relation, true to itself and its nature in this particular spot and this particular moment in time.” And language has music as lovely as the chimes of leaves in a summer breeze. We might even say that it is language, in its musicality, imagery, and meaning, that gives nature its profound affect in our being, an almost nostalgic mystic echoing and longing for a womb we are both in but can never return to. Galway Kinnell would I think agree:
That the music resulting from any of the methods
Of organizing English into rhythmic surges
Can sound like the music resulting from any other,
Being the music not of a method but of the language;
And after proposing that free verse is a variant
Of formal verse, using unpredictably the acoustic
Repetitions which formal verse employs regularly;
and after playing recordings of the gopher frog’s
Long line of glottal stops, sounding like rumblings
In an empty stomach, and the notes of the hermit thrush
Pipes one after another, then twangles together,
And the humpback whale’s gasp-cries as it passes
Out of the range of human perception of ecstasy,
And the wolf’s howls, one, and then several,
And then all the pack joining in a polyphony
To whatever in the sunlit midnight sky
Remains keeper of the axle the earth and
Its clasped lovers turn upon and cry to;
And after playing recordings of the angakoq
Chanting in Inukitut of his trance-like as a nanuk.
A songman of Amhen Land, Rahmani of Iran,
Neruda of Chile, Yeats, Thomas, Rukeyser,
To let the audience hear that our poems
Are of the same order as those of the other animals
And are composed, like theirs, when we find ourselves
Synchronized with the rhythms of the earth.
No matter where, in the city of Brno. Which cried
Its vowel too deep into the night to get it back,
Or at Ma’alaea on Maui in Hawaii, still plumping
Itself on the actual matter of pleasure there,
Or here in St. Paul, Minnesota, where I lean
At a podium trying to draw my talk to a close,
Or on Bleeker Street a time zone away in New York,
Where only minutes ago my beloved may have
Put down her book and drawn up her eiderdown
Around herself and turned out the light—
Now, causing me to garble a few words
And tangle my syntax, I imagine I can hear
Her say my name in the slow waves
Of the night and, faintly, being alone, sing.
From `the Music of Poetry’ by Galway Kinnell
Here in the elevation of language, the human being as being human no longer separates nature from language, but rather, integrates nature and language, in such a way, as to ontologically elevate both. This is nondual awareness being in the world as a fused web of interconnectedness.
If we acknowledge the nondual and not get seduced in our idealizing nature, freedom is then both choice and expression. It is true, as Noah so finely attunes to nature’s way that the synecdochal grass “is true to what it is, expresses the perfect harmony of relation which exists where it has grown; the cells and stalks, the seeds and wetness of the grass, of its meadow, is the living emergence of its being-in-relation, true to itself and its nature in this particular spot and this particular moment in time.” But, it is also true that in order for the human being to achieve this “perfect harmony,” she first makes conscious choices. Yet, in conjunction with choice, she has to first realize her separateness from nature as a function of her superordinate ontological status; that is, because she has lost her instinct, so to speak, she must use the training wheels of language to, not only mirror nature, but more importantly understand that she has emerged from nature as a self-aware consciousness. And further, to fully understand this psychological emergence, she must first (re)cognize that she is constituted relationally and her vehicle for recapitulating this “perfect harmony” is language. To paraphrase one teacher, to dissolve language, we must first have language. And it is this language and its choice for higher understanding and seeking nondual experience that will ultimately lead to what Noah calls a “perfect freedom.” This is when we, as humans being, authentically rise to ourselves in our Buddha natures; that is, when we reach the purest depths of mind.
II
But, in this luminous depth of mind, we come to realize that there in fact is no “essence” to be found. As Nagarjuna would have it, things do not exist in virtue of having the property of emptiness as an essence; but rather they are empty because they have no essence. If truth be told, there is no ultimate way the world is that one could characterize, that is, if one is referring to nondual experience. And so, other than being empty, we cannot ultimately know what the grass is, nor how and why it is. For the grass’s thingness presupposes its inherent existence and, as we know, grass is empty of inherent existence. Even if we “function” “in a world in which we have a lot of "things"--or our concepts, which we use to identify and classify the "things" that are.” Let me be clear. The grass has thingness, but only in the conventional sense. Ultimately, it is empty of the entity-ness in which it appears. And so, together the conventional (form) and the ultimate (emptiness) co-arise as existence. Again, Noah: “I find "emptiness" to be the most apt metaphor in this case, provided we sense that perfect emptiness and perfect fullness express the same principle.”
As I read what appears to be Noah’s existential formulation of nothingness – “For where there are things, there are also not-things… ” – I am happy to see that it is less of a formulation than a stage of a negative dialectic which ultimately collapses in senselessness. I say senselessness in the most literal of ways because “nothingness” as a conventional designation implies independent existence and a nihilism which, from a Buddhistic standpoint, is a complete misunderstanding of emptiness. As Noah says, “It is only "here" or "not here" when we place a box around it with our minds, enclose it in a conceptual structure that delineates its bounds and defines where and how and when its being "is" and where and how and when its being "isn't." Thing and nothing, being and no-being, is the most basic way in which we navigate our experience via concept. But understand that this is an imposition, and an important one at that, for it has arisen and lives in the world as everything else does, but it is no more or less true than anything else is.” (italics mine)
I think what it all comes down to is love. Love is the ultimate nondual. When I’m in a field or forest, I feel love. When I’m meditating on language or writing or reading, I feel love. Love feels me as I feel its “arising and dissolving manifestations” touching me throughout my being, giving me life. And I feel love when some words traveling across cyberspace from some unheard of farm in Oregon reach my sight, and I read them as if they were a poem written at night as a dream.
Poem Of Night
1
I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it's a shock to feel underneath them
The bones smile.
Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.
2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand--and so,
I know you're a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.
3
A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.
4
Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.
You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.
5
And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.
I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.
By Galway Kinnell
THE FACT OF EXISTENCE: RESPONSE TO OM AND NOAH
What continues to astound me is that the grass is at all, that from nothing we have everything. -- Noah
The philosopher Heidegger suggests that the human being seeks to achieve an authentic encounter with “Being” (a metaphysical ground that "determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood") and its tendency to conceal itself in conventionality, or ordinary reality. It is this authenticity, – which, by the way, I very much experience in Noah’s glorious post, `What is the Grass?’ – in its “anticipatory resoluteness” that apprehends (grasps, captures) an attitude of “wonder” and, in so doing, paradoxically “defamiliarizes and makes strange” the mystery of existence (“the enigma of a Faktum, the fact that one is; philosophy begins with the riddle of the completely obvious.”). Yes, wonder is what (in)spirits Noah’s post; it is the conveyance of mystery. Mystery, not because the wonder of existence is unknown; but conversely, what is concealed to the ordinary eye is knowable vis-à-vis esoteric or mystical revelation, what I would call an authentic encounter with emptiness! In that revelation, nothing is revealed as no independent thing, and everything is revealed as emptiness: an intentional tautology (in)spirited with paradox.
“One could just as easily ask what is the forest, but linguistically it would not capture so precisely the essence of the thing, for there is nothing that makes apparent unity of presence quite like a field of grass responding to the wind.”
I would like to underscore Om’s point regarding, not only the wonder of nature, but the wonder of nature because of language. Another paradox! It is not a coincidence that poets, masters of language, write about nature, are entranced by it, and often experience ecstasy (ex stasis, stepping outside oneself) in its presence. It is not nature itself independent of the consciousness that beholds it; it is human consciousness that has woven through nature the words that can best reveal its beauty, not merely lying there, but lying here within the presence of my being. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay, `On Nature,’ “A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty…. But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand as a part, and not as yet the last or highest expression of the final cause of Nature.” He continues,
The stars awaken a certain reverence, because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.
When we speak of nature in this manner, we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind. We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of the poet.
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.
For the transcendentalist, Emerson, nature is a mirror of Being’s authentic unconcealedness, consciousness looking within the wonder of its mystery, as that mystery. That is, not separate from it. And it is language that expands nature beyond its very horizon, beyond its circumscribed embodiment. Nature, in the “passing of its forms,” can only reveal its ultimate nature through mind. And so, it is mind, not nature that imbues the very mystery of nature’s unbounded beauty and expansiveness. And it begins in language, in the making intelligible what is merely fact. For in intelligibility comes imagination, and from imagination, wisdom, and then knowing; and from knowing comes the crystallized moment of realization: when the chrysalis of word transforms mind in the dissolution of conceptualization itself. What was once a mountain is now a mountain again. The nondual presence of inter-being radiates like nature itself as the sun rolls its finger over the globe of a new day.
As you said Om, it all comes
As you said Om, it all comes down to love. And to me, relatedness is the ground of love, and so whether it be "nature" or "language," the quality I'm always seeking, the obvious potential waiting in every experience, is a more authentic relatedness.
It is that authenticity that allows us to bridge the ostensible darkness between the position of embodied particularity we experience as ourselves, and the ultimate non-dual. This one blade of grass right outside my tent door: I have watched it, in the course of 2 weeks, grow from about 8 inches to nearly shoulder height, fatten out and bend down with seeds, swaying in lazy ovals, brushing the nylon flap as I sleep. I think now you know just what I mean when I say that I feel this grass as perfectly related. There is no other place in the universe like this one, no blade of grass with exactly the same structure. I think that the fact that I placed my tent here changed the light so that as it grows, it is bending away from the afternoon shadow cast by the rain fly. This is so ordinary, so normal, and yet it provokes wonder; and I myself feel so beautifully related to this one leaf of grass because it is a part of me. Between us there is this teaching creating itself, almost effortlessly, deepening every morning when I see it bending there again and notice how it has changed.
Like the blades of grass, like everything else arising, we as people have similar needs, similar requirements for becoming, and yet the particular ways in which we are related, the forms of our bodies, the thoughts passing through our minds, the whole of our karmic histories, differ. And so when we say authentic relating what I feel that we mean is a relation in which we acknowledge and bow to those particular forces which have formed us, and inform how we perceive and relate to the world. To honor how we feel and how we know, to respond as true to "our nature" as we are able. It will never look the same for two people, just as it will never look the same for two leaves, or trees, or rivers. But it is that very uniqueness which makes the relation true. And we can only do this when we let go of our judgments, and allow ourselves to be just what we are. I struggle against my judgements, narcissim, and self-hatred every day because I know that in that moment of authenticity I will feel myself as love.
To be perfectly related makes one wholly unique and perfectly ordinary. I think that's one reason why I hate authority: because the form of relatedness will be different at every point, everywhere. Because we live in a culture still preoccupied with forcing a relation to serve a preexisting, prepackaged, pre-valued form. In "nature," form always serves relation.
These things are so palpable to me at the level of human intimacy, and this is where that word authenticity really shines. Because when I am present to the particular expression of relation that I embody and can know and express that with honesty and clarity (this is my authenticity) I am also able, finally, to acknowledge and honor the particular relatedness of another. This honoring is most authentic, loving gift we can give to each other, as you have shown me.
The paradox, as I come to it in my own language, is that the unique moment of specific relation is the form of the infinite. It is the moment of our deepest connection, in the ceaseless particularity of the ordinary, whose form is it's emptiness.
To me, these feelings and ideas aren't abstract philosophical conjectures. They point to a way of feeling that can help us manifest the physical and social relationships we so desperately need to create a more expansive love, toward each other and our home .
A moment, this moment
Not much time - and so much time - a longer response will come sometime next week when I return to my desk.
Last night, nearly all night, down in the woods behind the house, a fox called out and his voice wove itself into my breath and into my dreams. At five in the morning, what must have been a wren - began it's song, easing me from sleep into a continous song. With each breath out, I became one of the drops of rain that fell - I am the tree, the pond, the fish,the tadpole. I sleep on sheets that hold the breath of everyone who put their breath and energy into making it happen - I am one with the cotton plant. When I stop and remember this, everything I see is part of time past, time present; part of everything and part of me. I am working to hear this continous song - so many lapses still; but to remember is to ease my suffering. Love to all.
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS: RESPONSE TO EMILY, NOAH, OM AND OM
With each breath out, I became one of the drops of rain that fell - I am the tree, the pond, the fish, the tadpole. I sleep on sheets that hold the breath of everyone who put their breath and energy into making it happen – Emily
For where there are things, there are also not-things. But if things are, then these not-things also are, for if they were not, how could any-thing be? How could we know what a thing is without having a way of identifying what is no-thing. – Noah
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
n William Wordsworth
I am so happy to join in on this discussion inspired by Noah’s splendently evocative post, What is the Grass? So much to respond to, for sure, but there is one particular aspect of Noah’s post that speaks to the nature of language and its relationship to nondual versus dual experience, and which Om also referred to in his post. Poetically wrought words such as “emptiness” and “nothing,” and paradoxical glosses like “"the grass" is both one blade and the whole meadow forest” might feel to some like metaphorical pearls strung upon a rare necklace of which endows miraculous powers to the one who finds it in her possession; or, in other ways, they might appear incoherent or esoteric and even nonsensical. However, what Noah didn’t explicitly state is that these dreamy words and thoughts seriously represent essential philosophical explorations into metaphysics, into the question of what is reality? His poetic position of nondualism (and what better position to convey the nondual!!), for example, attempts to establish some truths about the ultimate nature of subject and object while, at the same time, unmasking a metaphysics disguised as the world we live in. This means that in the very questions of quotidian life we find we are all philosophers!
Noah suggests, “The term non-dualism helps to capture a kind of artifice in this [our ordinary, dualistic] conceptual schism.” To truly understand nonduality, one has to radicalize metaphysics, something only a few western philosophers came close to doing (I’m thinking of Heidegger, Derrida and Wittgenstein, for example). To radicalize metaphysics steeped in dualism, however, one has to completely shift her conceptual system so as to replace logical assertions with an experiential view not limited to conceptualization. And though we must stick to a dualistic language to hopefully convey nondual experience, the conveyance itself will only succeed when the seer has a direct experience of nonduality. If not, this sentence, for example: “We might say that what is nothing presents the potential for all being, but also, that what exists expresses that nothing from which it comes, and in a sense, which it also is” has little meaning beyond its waxing poetic glaze.
We must never lose sight of the most important reason for understanding nonduality: that is, its value in relation to suffering and self-existence. Duality can never achieve the cessation of suffering because it can never perceptually approach the aporia of self-existence without unwittingly strengthening it (The dualistic way looks more like Camus’ Sisyphean moron lifting stones up a mountain than Sophocles’ oracle unlocking the mysteries of the human complex).
And so, the nondual of sunyata, the Sanskrit word for emptiness, reveals this most profound truth: that the easily negativized notion of emptiness actually means “swollen,” or “pregnant with possibilities” “(for "the grass" is both one blade and the whole meadow forest). But, in order for this truth to be truly understood, we must first radicalize (deconstruct) perception and appearance as they apply to objects -- and to the most recalcitrant and primary object, self – and elevate the categorical mind (ego-mind) with a more heuristic, experiential mind of no-self. In philosophical terms, it means that a shift from literal assertions that posit independent entities, and ascribing properties to those entities, to a language that speaks from an ultimate perspective, not as making assertions, but rather indicating (pointing) that which cannot be literally asserted.” It is only in this perspective (ultimately, experience) of a non-autonomous self-existing consciousness that Thich Nhat Hanh’s, “If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it”, can make any sense. The essence of nondualism is that nothing, no-thing can have a self-existent nature. In nondual experience, never again will we have to seek the One in the Many and founder in isolation and groundlessness.
And so, in reading this jewel of grass, it is less about comprehending Noah’s meditational passage than following deeply one’s own “philosophic mind” where it points to nondual experience along with Noah’s “soothing thoughts that spring out of [dualistic] human suffering.”
Om and company, the
Om and company, the exquisite responsiveness of your replies has given me so much to work with, and I am still processing everything, but I am feeling some excitment sitting here and observing the profound relationship between nature and language. I don't much like the hierarchical catagorizations and distinctions that we are forced to make. I read a few weeks ago this beautiful series of essays by Thomas Merton which attempt to place Zen and Christian Mysticism in conversation. I've since given the book away (which was hard to do, but felt right) so I can't quote him exactly, but in nearly the last line of the book he says that ultimatley, in the frustration of all we strive to understand by conception, we are faced with a choice between maddness and innocence.
I think about that innocence a lot. It is not the innocence of childhood (which lacks understanding), but that of the person who, having passed into and through the world of concept, seeking the deepest experience of "truth," has chosen to love without presupposition, and thus has become completely what she is. I see in this that choice you pointed me toward, which makes possible that freedom of expression. There is, in a sense, a letting go of "knowlege," of images and symbols no longer needed, so that one may be, simply, love.
And then I've been reading this book by Christopher Alexander called The Timeless Way of Building, which is an architecture book of deep spiritual insight. One point he makes, that really spoke to me--and really this is the main thesis behind the writing of this book--is that it is nearly impossible for us to be free, joyful, awake and alive, on the whole, as long as the environments we create continuously and insidiously work against the things we need to be true to our natures.
I think I'm probably correct in thinking that any person who has some life left in them will feel more at peace, more comfortable, here on my rug in this wild field of grass than in the majority of our human spaces (the strip malls, glass office buildings, suburban sprawl, through which most of are forced to move). The space where I like to sit is one not in conflict with itself, with its own needs, with its own nature.
A human being needs relationship, community, meaningful contact with others in every day life, to feel integrated and connected. And yet many of us live in environments that prohibit this experience. We know that many of our environments work against us psychologically and materially, we know that our societies are not regenerative and restorative as nature is, but, on the whole, destructive and exploitative. To me this is a reflection of alienated consciousness. When I speak of "nature," I think that in the barest way I mean that space in which a thing can be true to itself, exactly what it needs to be, which is, or course, without thingness, related completely. When we are at home in this way, we feel radiant love.
In my mind, perhaps the greatest expression of the inadequacy of our conventional (western dualistic) world-view is the persisting idea that somehow the world is made, created as is by master plan from the outside in. That the artist makes, like God Himself, something profound, that a individuated mind / ego brings from nothing, everything, of her own exteriorized brilliance.
One thing that "nature" has taught me is that its order and harmony, its infinitely complex, almost unknowable web of relations, a language of patterns, grows spontaneously and inevitably at every place and at every scale, so that all the forces that arise are held in perfect balance. I love this fractal quality: any heathy ecosystem we look at, at almost every scale has it. Be it the cell of a plant of an entire landscape, it is in a sense, this constant equalizing of energy that gives rise to ever more complex systems of relations. It is so egoless! This is what separates "natural" systems from human ones.
But, we only have to think of "nature" as somehow apart or separate from the world we 'make' and live in because we've forgotten how to build a world that is restorative and regenerative and truly alive. When you are in a place that is true to itself, when some arising in this world is able to be just that, what we know as love, it is always life giving.
And so I loved your point that nature "predates language," that language has grown out of nature. Yes yes, language is more than the training wheels, i think it is language that makes nature known to herself. (Makes us known to ourselves!) They are mirrors and the more time I spend attuning to the natural world, the more compelled I feel to deepen my language so that I might "speak back" the increasing intricacy of relationships I am able to observe. I mean this at all the grounds of contemplation to which i have access. And I guess I'm thinking that the better our language is able to mirror that "nature" out of which we have grown, the less alienated our consciousness will be.
WHAT CANNOT BE CONSTRUCTED CANNOT BE DESTROYED EITHER: INNOCENCE
WHAT CANNOT BE CONSTRUCTED CANNOT BE DESTROYED EITHER: INNOCENCE, EVIL, AND SUFFERING
Noah, I think the quote you’re referring to is from Thomas Merton’s `Zen and the Birds of Appetite,’ in which he says:
The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see. (ITALICS MINE)
I assume Wordsworth’s great Ode I quoted from has also invoked this experience of “innocence” for you. In “Intimations on the Recollections of Childhood,” Wordsworth, in trying to find meaning in loss, uses the “philosophic mind” to rediscover what we might compare to Zen Buddhism’s “Original Face.” And, indeed, he finds this innocence, what you describe as “not the innocence of childhood (which lacks understanding), but that of the person who, having passed into and through the world of concept, seeking the deepest experience of "truth," has chosen to love without presupposition, and thus has become completely what she is.” An innocence, by the way, “which makes possible that freedom of expression.” Freedom we might agree because it transcends fate, the fate, at least, of negative afflictive emotions, or suffering. The fate of “sleep and forgetting” our “Original Face.”
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Like Merton, Wordsworth finds the “eternal Silence: truths that wake,/To perish never” and which are beyond the conceptual dualistic world of birth and death. Birth and death represent the ultimate “contradiction because they speak to self-existence and the experience of lack, or the sense of groundlessness it engenders. Thus, this “innocence” that Merton speaks of, and which I believe Wordsworth alluded to, is in fact only an innocence in its originary context, which paradoxically means the wisdom that understands the ultimate nature of reality, which is empty of inherent existence. We are “driving toward” the horizon of conceptual language because we are an interconnected web of consciousness collectively evolving and paradigmatically pushing through duality into the arms of nondual awareness. As Wordsworth continues,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
Noah, it’s interesting that you experience this “innocence” as, not so much wisdom, per se, but love (“that of the person who, having passed into and through the world of concept, seeking the deepest experience of "truth," has chosen to love without presupposition, and thus has become completely what she is.”). Your choice to focus on love instead of wisdom invoked for me the etymological doubleness of innocence. Innocence (from the Latin in, not, and nocere, "evil" or "guilty") refers to a general lack of guilt, with respect to any kind of crime, sin, or wrongdoing. But, it also suggests a state of unknowing, like the innocence of childhood that you and Wordsworth speak of prior to the “deeper experience of truth,” or wisdom. In wisdom spiritual traditions, these two definitions of innocence are related. I remember Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh once attributing to Jesus the saying, “Love is spontaneous law,” by which he meant that what we call law, the system of rules, is unnecessary when one has realized true spiritual love, or Enlightenment.
This aspect of “innocence” that transforms into love is peculiarly close to the Christian perspective, in which love is the overcoming of evil, or original sin. Evil, the loss of innocence, or the “state of deprivation of the original holiness,” from the early Christian view, is equated with suffering and sin. According to Pope John Paul II, theologically-speaking, evil is “a certain lack, limitation or distortion of good” and man suffers because he cannot share in that good; that is, he loses awareness of his own inherent goodness or, more specifically, “in the goodness of the Creator” Who “proclaims the good of creatures.” Thus, evil is always a result of man’s “lack” and there is, in turn, always an opportunity to redeem oneself, to re-establish one’s inherent connection to his or her own goodness.
For John Paul, repentance is the act of seeking redemption for one’s distortion of good which results in the suffering of evil. Further, redemption, “accomplished through satisfactory love, remains always open to all love expressed in human suffering. In this dimension—the dimension of love—the Redemption which has already been completely accomplished is, in a certain sense, constantly being accomplished.”
Thus, the innocence of wisdom in Merton’s interpretation of Zen is not surprisingly similar to the Christian innocence of love. Both involve a level of awareness that repairs the dualistic split between either phenomena (Zen) or man from God (Christianity). In Merton’s Zen, innocence is the ultimate understanding of the nondual experience of emptiness; in Christianity, innocence is a higher duality of overcoming evil vis-à-vis love; that is, recognizing the divine mercy in the call to repentance, the purpose of which is to strengthen goodness “both in man himself and in his relationships with others and especially with God.” I say Christianity’s metaphysical system is dualistic because it postulates two basic substances, God and man, both having independent existence.
From the point of view of Advaita Vedanta, suffering is a dualistic net of contradictions but which resolves those contradictions in a way very similar to Zen:
"To see the Universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. Look at the net and its many contradictions. You do and undo at every step. You want peace, love, happiness and work hard to create pain, hatred and war. You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit. See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them—your very seeing them will make them go.
For everything there are innumerable causal factors. But the source of all that is the Infinite Possibility, the Supreme reality, which is in you, and which throws its power and light and love on every experience. But, this source is not a cause and no cause is a source. Because of that, I say everything is uncaused. You may try to trace how a thing happens, but you cannot find out why a thing is as it is. A thing is as it is, because the universe is as it is."
Sri Nisargaddatta Maharaj, I Am That, p. 10-11
The idea of innocence outlined in the context of nature, evil, suffering, love and wisdom underscores the necessity for a nondual philosophy, one we might call value-centric in that it empathizes ethics as its driving force. Ethics is what bridges abstract linguistic, ontological, and epistemic aspects of morality with its application, both culturally and psychologically, in how collectively we are to live and care for each other. If we explore innocence and evil in the psychological and philosophical contexts, for example, rather than from a narrow moralistic one, the dualism of madness that Merton asserts can be transcended. Suffering, when defined in an integrated context of affective (emotion) theory and a nondual metaphysics provides a phenomenological portal from which to free ourselves from the “wrong” view and negative afflictive emotions that result in and perpetuate suffering.
II
I like how you shift from Merton to Alexander, as if trying to apply or even integrate fundamental Buddhist or nondual insight into aesthetic principles, in this case, architecture. As you say, ”it is nearly impossible for us to be free, joyful, awake and alive, on the whole, as long as the environments we create continuously and insidiously work against the things we need to be true to our natures.” How true this is! And “true to our natures,” of course, means true to our nondual natures, that is, our naturally “pure” (innocent!) “hidden immortal potency or element within the purest depths of the mind.” “'... that which has permanence, bliss, Self, and thorough purity is called the "meaning of pure truth’.”
Or what the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra describes as: “'Permanent is the Self; the Self is thoroughly pure. The thoroughly pure is called "bliss". Permanent, blissful, Self, and thoroughly pure is the one-gone-thus [i.e. Buddha]'.” (Self here means the matrix of interconnectedness in all beings.)
The point is simply this: being true to one’s nature is designing one’s reality in such a way as aligned to one’s intuitive awareness free of negative afflictive emotions. “Strip malls, glass office buildings, suburban sprawls” all reflect attachment to negative afflictive emotions necessarily because they are constituted in (and literally built via) minds motivated by craving and fear (addiction/consumerism) rather than by needs that foster freedom from craving and fear. Though Noah’s rug “in this wild field of grass” might be more symbolic of the psychological and cultural need for simplicity (“barest way”) and interconnectedness with nature, other human beings, and community, the point is clear; “I like to sit [in a space] not in conflict with itself, with its own needs, with its own nature.”
“And yet many of us live in environments that prohibit this experience. We know that many of our environments work against us psychologically and materially, we know that our societies are not regenerative and restorative as nature is, but, on the whole, destructive and exploitative."
Not only negative afflictive emotions, but the “wrong” view, that is, a faulty and erroneous metaphysics (deluded mind) is what leads to these artifactual, or cultural aesthetic inadequacies of expression, including architecture. Noah says this philosophy or worldview is based on the belief “that somehow the world is made, created as is by master plan from the outside in. That the artist makes, like God Himself, something profound, that an individuated mind / ego brings from nothing, everything, of her own exteriorized brilliance.” This is what we might call the isolated mind, the “commonsense” dualistic perception as that between objects and their causal relations.
Following the lead of the deep ecology movement and thinkers like Fritjof Capra, in his `The Web of Life,’ Noah continues that thought process waving towards nondual experience:
"One thing that "nature" has taught me is that its order and harmony, its infinitely complex, almost unknowable web of relations, a language of patterns, grows spontaneously and inevitably at every place and at every scale, so that all the forces that arise are held in perfect balance. I love this fractal quality: any healthy ecosystem we look at, at almost every scale has it. Be it the cell of a plant of an entire landscape, it is in a sense, this constant equalizing of energy that gives rise to ever more complex systems of relations. It is so egoless! This is what separates "natural" systems from many (but not all) human ones."
The language is close enough for ineffability to transform into knowability and intelligibly and, more important, translatability. But, the idealism (and, at times, romanticism) of spiritually elevated worldviews notwithstanding, our expansiveness in expression must not overreach what the individual must achieve in “accessing” the “grounds of contemplation” and self awareness. Nisargadatta once said, “I am a seeker seeking myself.” How beautiful the sound! But seeking is serious business. There is no circumventing the psychological to achieve spiritual bliss, compassion, and wisdom. And, at the same time, nondual experience cannot be “known” without meditation. Transcending the innocence of ignorance and the ignorance of suffering requires a radical change of one’s mind and closely observing how those changes manifest in the reified mirroring of one’s life experience; simply, how one chooses to live. The ultimate language is silence and the tools are many, the mental factors of mind, which include, for example, intelligence, feeling, recognition / discrimination / distinguishing awareness, intention, will, concentration /attention / mental application; resolution / aspiration; interest / appreciation; mindfulness / recollection - repeatedly bringing objects back to mind; faith / confidence; self-respect, considerateness / decency; flexibility; equanimity / clear-minded tranquility.
THE GRASSY SIDE OF AUTHENTICITY
Noah, thank you for your continued dialogue and opportunity to create these authentic expressions of truth-in-relatedness.
According to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, “Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.” The essential and fundamental flaw in dualistic thinking and experience is not in what it sees, but rather in what it leaves out. And what it leaves out is living experience. The pure beauty of the nondual is found in its inclusiveness, in its “continual opening to an immersion in a natural world that is not oneself; it is the field in which we live, breathe, think, and love.” [italics mine]. This is what we mean by integral: complex (layered), inclusive (holistic), plural (reaching), subtle (hidden), always pointing (showing), contextual (related), dynamic (processing), synergistic (dependent), indeterminate (amibiguous), integrated (webbed). In this way, language must rigorously, intentionally, and strategically attempt to “catch” (apprehend) living experience. It must be evocative and expressive so as to radicalize its own limits of impression and representation. This is the philosophical seeking the authentic as a study of reality.
“As you said Om, it all comes down to love. And to me, relatedness is the ground of love, and so whether it be "nature" or "language," the quality I'm always seeking, the obvious potential waiting in every experience, is a more authentic relatedness.”
Authenticity is one of those constructs that is more easily experienced and pointed to than defined. It is not experienced as a thing but rather as “a way into things.” Paradoxically, its groundedness in our being “causes” us to see it, not at first as a fullness, but as lack, as a fracture in consciousness. And, like all phenomena, its “truth” can be experienced (and expressed) throughout levels of being: in body, mind, and spirit. There are two aspects to authenticity I think most would agree: one, it is determined by and realized through direct experience, and, two, it is at “the limits of language” in that its project is one of extricating the individual from external pressure and influence. Language, as we know, is culturally determined and, consequently, the reality it confers upon experience often runs counter to individual freedom.
So much so is reality linguistically-determined that, according to the philosopher Heidegger, finding the authentic must occur in the mode of silence and is first felt in an “intimation of primordial understanding.” This “primal rapport” with Being is thus both its listening and consent of the good and called by Heidegger the “call of conscience.” Thus, the authentic is always the “disclosing” or opening to what was heretofore concealed (repressed) from one’s own consciousness. This can be seen at the level of body (Merleau-Ponty’s “intentional tissue”), for example, how, on a perceptual level, the living body’s ongoing process of organizing coherent things into “sense-laden configurations.” This is the nature side of consciousness that Noah consistently refers to:
“This one blade of grass right outside my tent door: I have watched it, in the course of 2 weeks, grow from about 8 inches to nearly shoulder height, fatten out and bend down with seeds, swaying in lazy ovals, brushing the nylon flap as I sleep. I think now you know just what I mean when I say that I feel this grass as perfectly related.”
Or, the authentic can affectively (emotionally) reach over from the body into mind (language) yet never separating the two!! Our body is now emerging through feeling!!! then language into the sacred intersubjective enigmatic space of betweenness. This is the conscious birth of the relational and, in turn, the ethical! I say ethical because one’s awareness of one’s relatedness (inter-being) to other beings engenders compassion. In a heideggerian sense, this intersubjective opening is what most challenges the ethos of the ethic, and wherein lies the “call to conscience.” Though Heidegger’s “call” is inextricably tied to an existential anxiety of death awareness (which locks it in dualism), rather than the awareness of the self’s sense of lack or groundlessness of self (nondual), he nonetheless captures the essence of authenticity.
The compassion of authenticity is in the very goodness of “to be” and yet authenticity is incessantly shadowed by the inauthenticity of ignorance (obscured knowing). But, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen’s brilliant “Anthem,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dIv2MXU7_4 the paradoxical nature of mind is such that the cracks of ego also allow the light of pure awareness in, even in the sorrow and terror of impermanence. Thus, we are always at the edge and moment of choice. The choice to be authentic.
In a recent paper on Heidegger by our own James, he says,
“Our relationship to the call [of conscience] is one of listening. That said, it is a silent call. Nothing is expressed in it. The hinge of the experience is the mode of consciousness from which one hears it. If one is ready for the call, one hears it and takes it upon oneself: one "want[s] to have a conscience" (SuZ, 334). In this case one is thrown into the nothing, the lack, at the heart of one's own being; home becomes unhomely, one feels uncanny in a state of anxiety. If one is not ready for the call, one flees back to everydayness, turning away from oneself….What one hears – the content of the call of conscience – is, "Guilty!"
And what about authenticity as Spirit? Body in living experience is authentic in its perceptual prowess, in its attentiveness and synaesthetic fullness. Mind is authentic in language’s expressions of feeling and thought seeking understanding and intimacy. I would say that authenticity as Spirit is nondual experience. And thus my affinity to Nagarjuna’s Middle Way in Buddhist philosophy. In the essence of nondual awareness is a culminated wisdom and compassion. In a personal communication with Noah yesterday, he asked if for me wisdom and love are the same. It was a great question because it was obvious but not evident. I think in nondual awareness wisdom and love are the same necessarily because wisdom (defined as understanding the ultimate nature of reality), compassion (the desire to alleviate suffering), and love (the desire to create joy) are all aligned and thus mirror each other’s presence in relationship, relationship to self, to other, to all beings without exception. As Noah says, “It is that authenticity that allows us to bridge the ostensible darkness between the position of embodied particularity we experience as ourselves, and the ultimate non-dual.”
This “ostensible darkness” of “embodied particularity,” that is, identity/self/ego is exactly what obscures the authentic and its freedom of expression and choice. In this sense, authenticity and freedom are synonymous. This could be, for example, the freedom to choose one’s life or the freedom to express one’s meanings (and thus, truth). This is a necessary function of authenticity: because it concerns a person's relation with the world and cannot be arrived at by simply repeating a conditioned set of actions or taking up a set of positions (beliefs). In this manner, authenticity is connected with creativity: the impetus to action must arise from the person in question, and not be externally imposed. For this reason, the authentic is rooted in process and evolves across lines of development and through levels of awareness. In a way, the “embodied particularity” of the individual can never really be authentic, though I think what Noah means is that we, through intentionality, can rise towards authenticity, like “the blades of grass” and “everything else arising.” The keys of course, are awareness, understanding, responsiveness, and staying open to the very indeterminacy that reflects life’s flow, as it is. And the way we flow as individuals is our uniqueness, but it is how we choose to flow that determines whether we are living in our truth and striving for authenticity. Purifying the negative afflictive emotions that create the “ostensible darkness” is the first and last steps to authenticity and, when those extraordinary delusions caused by negative emotions are shaken out, what else can be left but the most ordinary love and living one can experience?