Internal context

Gregory Bateson, commenting on one of his essays in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, writes that

it extends the notion of informational control to include the field of morphogenesis and, by discussing what happens in absence of needed information, brings out the importance of the context into which information is received.…
Message material, or information, comes out of a context into a context, and in other parts of the book the focus has been on the context out of which information came. Here the focus is rather upon the internal state of the organism as a context into which the information must be received.
Of course, neither focus is sufficient by itself for our understanding of either animals or men. But it is perhaps not an accident that in these papers dealing with non-human organisms the “context” which is discussed is the obverse or complement of the “context” upon which I have focussed attention in other parts of the book.
Consider the case of the unfertilized frog’s egg for which the entry point of the spermatozoon defines the plane of bilateral symmetry of the future embryo.
The prick of a hair from a camel’s hair brush can be substituted and still carry the same message. From this it seems that the external context out of which the message comes is relatively undefined. From the entry point alone, the egg learns but little about the external world. But the internal context into which the message comes must be exceedingly complex.
The unfertilized egg, then, embodies an immanent question to which the entry point of the spermatozoon provides an answer; and this way of stating the matter is the contrary or obverse of the conventional view, which would see the external context of learning as a “question” to which the ‘right’ behavior of the organism is an answer.

— Bateson (1972, 395-6)

The logic of vagueness

Conversation degenerates when we lose sight of the polyversity of language, and of the ineluctable vagueness of our thoughts. According to Peirce, ‘No concept, not even those of mathematics, is absolutely precise; and some of the most important for everyday use are extremely vague’ (CP6.496, c. 1906). Genuinely informative communication depends on taking this necessary vagueness into account. Properly understanding any utterance requires you to interpret it with the degree of vagueness appropriate to the situational context. Every language user has to develop a sensitivity to context at an early age, though few are conscious of it.

The perspectival nature of linguistic systems means that as children learn to use words and linguistic constructions in the manner of adults, they come to see that the exact same phenomenon may be construed in many different ways for different communicative purposes depending on many factors in the communicative context.

— Tomasello (1999, 213)

To construe is to simplify, and to simplify is to generalize: a symbol, by referring to a type of experience, can thus refer to many tokens of it on various occasions, including future occasions. Even proper nouns (names of specific things, places, people etc.) are general signs, because each implies the continuity of its object through time: each momentary manifestation of the object is a token of that type, and some features of it may vary from one occurrence to another. (If you notice a difference in someone’s characteristic behavior, you might say, ‘It’s not like him to do that!’) And the more common a word is, the broader is its reference.

Things that you talk about, whether you perceive them to be in the external or internal world, are already construed, categorized and ‘framed’ by the time you mention them. But each actual reference to them can affect your framing habits; and these in turn affect your way of talking about them, or hearing others talk about them. Since everyone has a history of cycling through such loops countless times, and this history determines for each her ‘natural’ idiom, synchronizing reference between speakers is not always easy – hence polyversity.

The upshot of this in communication is that in trying to connect words with referents or experiences, ‘all sorts of risks are taken, assumptions and guesses made’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19). This is the only practical way to reduce the many possible ‘construals’ of phenomena – or meanings of words – to the simplicity required for the maintenance of a conversation.

Sperber and Wilson take this as an argument against what they call ‘the mutual-knowledge hypothesis,’ but they are using the word knowledge here in an absolute sense, as equivalent to objective certainty (Sperber and Wilson 1995, 19-20). In reality, the common ground that people must have in order to carry on a conversation is a network of rather vague default assumptions. Actual conversation often consists of attempts to render some of the ‘mutual knowledge’ more precise, but in the actual context, there are pragmatic limits to this precision.

William James, in typically elegant fashion, gives a more psychologically realistic account of cognition as ‘virtual knowing.’

Now the immensely greater part of all our knowing never gets beyond this virtual stage. It never is completed or nailed down. … To continue thinking unchallenged is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our practical substitute for knowing in the completed sense. As each experience runs by cognitive transition into the next one, and we nowhere feel a collision with what we elsewhere count as truth or fact, we commit ourselves to the current as if the port were sure. We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of the future of our path.

— James, ‘A World of Pure Experience’ (Kuklick 1172)

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception takes a slightly different perspective:

My set of experiences is presented as a concordant whole, and the synthesis takes place not in so far as they all express a certain invariant, and in the identity of the object, but in that they are all collected together, by the last of their number, in the ipseity of the thing. The ipseity is, of course, never reached: each aspect of the thing which falls to our perception is still only an invitation to perceive beyond it, still only a momentary halt in the perceptual process. If the thing itself were reached, it would be from that moment arrayed before us and stripped of its mystery. It would cease to exist as a thing at the very moment when we thought to possess it. What makes the ‘reality’ of the thing is therefore precisely what snatches it from our grasp.

— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 271)

This is, in context, quite consistent with Peirce’s definition of ‘reality’:

I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing’s characters will remain absolutely untouched.

CP 6.495 (c. 1906)

In the process of inquiry or of learning, what James called ‘our sense of a determinate direction’ is a feeling that our knowledge of reality is becoming more precise, getting closer to the Truth. But semiotic experience teaches that our knowledge is never completely determinate.

No cognition and no Sign is absolutely precise, not even a Percept; and indefiniteness is of two kinds, indefiniteness as to what is the Object of the Sign, and indefiniteness as to its Interpretant, or indefiniteness in Breadth and in Depth.

— Peirce, CP 4.543 (1906)

Any knowledge that will prove useful as guidance into the future must be general, and thus indefinite in that sense.

Yet every proposition actually asserted must refer to some non-general subject …. Indeed, all propositions refer to one and the same determinately singular subject, well-understood between all utterers and interpreters; namely, to The Truth, which is the universe of all universes, and is assumed on all hands to be real. But besides that, there is some lesser environment of the utterer and interpreter of each proposition that actually gets conveyed, to which that proposition more particularly refers and which is not general.

CP 5.506

This ‘lesser environment’ is of course the more immediate context. Even if the dynamic Object of the sign is fully determinate, is The Whole Truth, the sign itself is still ‘indefinite as to its Interpretant,’ i.e. vague in that context.

No communication of one person to another can be entirely definite, i.e., non-vague. We may reasonably hope that physiologists will some day find some means of comparing the qualities of one person’s feelings with those of another, so that it would not be fair to insist upon their present incomparability as an inevitable source of misunderstanding. Besides, it does not affect the intellectual purport of communications. But wherever degree or any other possibility of continuous variation subsists, absolute precision is impossible. Much else must be vague, because no man’s interpretation of words is based on exactly the same experience as any other man’s. Even in our most intellectual conceptions, the more we strive to be precise, the more unattainable precision seems. It should never be forgotten that our own thinking is carried on as a dialogue, and though mostly in a lesser degree, is subject to almost every imperfection of language.

CP 5.506

Readers who want a more precise definition of vagueness, or a more specific definition of generality, might consult Peirce, EP2:350-53 (or CP 5.446-450, 1905).

Relevance in context

Sperber and Wilson (1995, 142) suggest that the goal of the comprehension process is

to maximize the relevance of any information being processed. … people hope that the assumption being processed is relevant (or else they would not bother to process it at all), and they try to select a context which will justify that hope: a context which will maximize relevance. In verbal comprehension in particular, it is relevance which is treated as given, and context which is treated as a variable.

This is another perspective on the process of ‘context construction’ described in Chapter 15. But context being holarchic, that process itself has a context. Relevance involves some relation to the known (or presupposed), but also some novelty; if i tell you what you already take for granted, that is not relevant. Relevance itself, then, is determined by context, i.e. by the ‘state of information’ (Peirce) in which the communication or ‘processing’ is situated – or in Peircean terms, in which the sign determines an interpretant.

Peirce in a 1906 text identified three kinds of interpretant:

In all cases, it includes feelings; for there must, at least, be a sense of comprehending the meaning of the sign. If it includes more than mere feeling, it must evoke some kind of effort. It may include something besides, which, for the present, may be vaguely called “thought.” I term these three kinds of interpretant the “emotional,” the “energetic,” and the “logical” interpretants.

EP2:409

Naturally it is the ‘logical interpretant, the conveyed thought’ (EP2:410) which is most crucial for a sign involved in a process of dialog or inquiry; and ‘the essence of the logical interpretant’ (EP2:412) is the habit which is established or modified by that semiosic process. Not all signs can have a logical interpretant, and even a sign which would have one if the semiotic process were completed may not produce it in an actual semiotic process, depending on the timing:

It is not to be supposed that upon every presentation of a sign capable of producing a logical interpretant, such interpretant is actually produced. The occasion may either be too early or too late. If it is too early, the semiosis will not be carried so far, the other interpretants sufficing for the rude functions for which the sign is used. On the other hand, the occasion will come too late if the interpreter be already familiar with the logical interpretant, since then it will be recalled to his mind by a process which affords no hint of how it was originally produced. Moreover, the great majority of instances in which formations of logical interpretants do take place are very unsuitable to serve as illustrations of the process, because in them the essentials of this semiosis are buried in masses of accidental and hardly relevant semioses that are mixed with the former.

EP2:414

What makes a semiosis ‘relevant’ or essential (rather than accidental) to the formation of a logical interpretant? To deal with this question, Peirce constructs a scenario of an inquiry process and conducts a thought-experiment to investigate how it works.

The best way that I have been able to hit upon for simplifying the illustrative example which is to serve as our matter upon which to experiment and observe is to suppose a man already skillful in handling a given sign (that has a logical interpretant) to begin now before our inner gaze for the first time, seriously to inquire what that interpretant is. It will be necessary to amplify this hypothesis by a specification of what his interest in the question is supposed to be.… unless our hypothesis be rendered specific as to that interest, it will be impossible to trace out its logical consequences, since the way the interpreter will conduct the inquiry will greatly depend upon the nature of his interest in it.

EP2:414

The inquirer’s ‘interest’ is part of the context of the inquiry – not the ‘context which is treated as a variable’ according to Sperber and Wilson, but the situational context which determines what is essential and what is irrelevant in the text.

Beyond the Golden Rule

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish. Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

— Luke 6:32-6 (RSV); likewise Thomas 95, etc.

Many Christians, if not most, would say that Jesus was the only son of God. But here, Jesus calls upon all his followers to be sons of the Most High (υἱοὶ ὑψίστου) by practicing his mercy. This compassion is impartial, not based on one’s love for, or judgement of, the other. A Zen text takes this non-judgement even further:

People who really practice the Way
Do not see the faults of the world;
If you see the errors of others,
Your own error abets them.
If others err but you do not,
Your own error’s still faulty.

— Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)

The other side of this coin is detachment from the results of your own actions, as the Bhagavad-Gita teaches:

The world is in the bonds of action, unless the action is consecration. Let thy actions then be pure, free from the bonds of desire.

— Bhagavad-Gita 3:9 (Mascaró)

Actions do not cling to me because I am not attached to their results. Those who understand this and practice it live in freedom.

— Bhagavad-Gita 4:14 (Easwaran)

Gandhi, in commenting on the Gita, says ‘If we wish to give up sin, we should give up virtue too. There is possessiveness in clinging even to virtue.’ The practice of detachment comes highly recommended in scriptures ranging from the Vedic to the Bahá’í:

Well may he be content to live a hundred years who acts without attachment—who works his work with earnestness, but without desire, not yearning for its fruits—he, and he alone.

— Isha Upanishad (Prabhavananda)

Set thy heart upon thy work, but never upon its reward.

— Bhagavad-Gita 2:47 (Mascaró)

Make not your deeds as snares wherewith to entrap the object of your aspiration …

— Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶36

How do you set your heart upon your work – which, almost by definition, has a purpose – without being attached to its results? It could be compared to a pure scientist (according to the Peircean ideal of scientific inquiry) impartially testing her hypothesis while remaining free of any desire to prove it true. Or you might think of it as ‘controlled folly,’ as Castaneda’s Don Juan calls it:

Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way part of his concern.

— Castaneda 1971

Perhaps we can sum it all up with this precept attributed to Zengetsu:

Live with cause and leave results to the great law of the universe.

Tenants and guests

Gospel of Thomas 65 (Lambdin):

He said, ‘There was a good man who owned a vineyard. He leased it to tenant farmers so that they might work it and he might collect the produce from them. He sent his servant so that the tenants might give him the produce of the vineyard. They seized his servant and beat him, all but killing him. The servant went back and told his master. The master said, “Perhaps he did not recognize them.” He sent another servant. The tenants beat this one as well. Then the owner sent his son and said, “Perhaps they will show respect to my son.” Because the tenants knew that it was he who was the heir to the vineyard, they seized him and killed him. Let him who has ears hear.’

Perhaps the most startling thing about this story is the abrupt ending, or rather lack of the ending we find in other versions of the same parable: in Mark 12:9, Matthew 21:40-41, and Luke 20:15-16, we are assured that the wicked tenants will receive their just punishment. All three synoptic gospels place the story in a context which invites a specific reading: the vineyard owner represents God, the tenants represent the religious establishment, and of course Jesus is the son of God, soon to be killed by the powers that be. But such an interpretation is not really at home in Thomas, where Jesus is not said to be God’s only son. The omission of the ending in Thomas could be written off as accidental or careless, but this seems unlikely, considering that the very next saying in Thomas is the same one that follows up this parable in the other three Gospels:

Jesus said, ‘Show me the stone which the builders have rejected. That one is the cornerstone.’

— Thomas 66 (Lambdin)

To make sense of Thomas 65, then, we need a different context and reading from what we find in the other Gospels. The problem is that if we think of the vineyard’s owner as a human (rather than an inscrutable God), then he appears to be a rather slow learner, not to mention ineffectual (as Davies 2002 points out). But perhaps this fallibility is itself the point of the parable; perhaps we can learn from the owner’s error, which was to absent himself from production of the fruits of the vineyard.

Suppose you think of the vineyard as your everyday practice, which should be guided by the meaning of scripture (which Thomas from the beginning challenges you to find). According to Thomas 2, the authentic seeker eventually finds himself ‘king over the All.’ This happens when you realize that this world is your world (Chapter 4) – as Thomas Traherne put it,

You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.

— (The First Century, 29)

Later on, though, you may become complacent or absent-minded, and turn over your guidance system to habits or projects uninformed by actual experience or living semiosis. Then your habits are not really your own any more; they are like tenants of your body, and of course the ego is the worst tenant of them all. In this context, Thomas 65 would be warning you that habits are greedy and addictive, so if you turn your life over to them, you will have a hard time getting it back. These ghosts do not realize that they are ‘heirs of the whole world’ and are therefore jealous of the ‘children of the living Father’ (Thomas 3), who do realize it. So they are grimly (even lethally) determined to hold on to whatever part of your life they can get a grip on. Put your life on automatic pilot, turn it over to your ego-self, and you may lose your wholeness, just as the son in the parable lost his life. Punishing the wicked tenants won’t redeem the situation, either; the only solution is to quit acting like an absentee landlord – inhabit the living body, live the time.

The preceding parable in Thomas, Saying 64 (which also has its parallels in the synoptic Gospels), could be taken as a warning that business – being occupied all the time with buying and selling, profit and loss, or even with social obligations – is no substitute for living the time:

Jesus said, ‘A person was receiving guests. When he had prepared the dinner, he sent his servant to invite the guests.
The servant went to the first and said to that one, “My master invites you.”
That person said, “Some merchants owe me money; they are coming to me tonight. I must go and give them instructions. Please excuse me from dinner.”
The servant went to another and said to that one, “My master has invited you.”
That person said to the servant, “I have just bought a house and I have been called away for a day. I shall have no time.”
The servant went to another and said to that one, “My master invites you.” He said to him, “My friend is to be married and I am to arrange the banquet. I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me from dinner.”
The servant went to another and said to that one, “My master invites you.”
That person said to the servant, “I have bought an estate and I am going to collect the rent. I shall not be able to come. Please excuse me.”
The servant returned and said to his master, “The people whom you invited to dinner have asked to be excused.”
The master said to his servant, “Go out on the streets and bring back whomever you find to have dinner.”
Buyers and merchants [will] not enter the places of my father.’

— Thomas 64 (Meyer)

The self-conscious point

And he said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.’

— Mark 4:26-29 (RSV)

Let him who has ears hear: ears grow in the everyday and everynight earth of practice. The kingdom is not consciously constructed, as no one knows how to do that; the role of consciousness here is to harvest the fruits of unconscious process, to let the felt sense find its expression in a form of self-control grounded in experience.

The mind’s attention to itself is really to the working memory of its (immediately prior) activity. When we engage in this recursive activity, becoming conscious of consciousness, there is a temptation to believe that we are ascending a hierarchy toward a ‘pure’ consciousness. But perhaps our consciousness of consciousness is no more conscious than was the original grounded awareness. The life of the organism depends on its awareness of the Other systems that constitute its context, not on its Self-awareness. If we believe in our arrogance that we are more than organisms, we become less than mindful, breaking the meaning cycle of the living Word manifesting itself in practice and perception.

Harvest-time comes in a flash, and when the lightning flashes it lightens the “past” as well as the “future.” Presence becomes an all-encompassing space of interbeing rather than a point on a timeline.

A pure self-consciousness would be pointlike; and according to Peirce in one of his 1903 Harvard lectures, it would be ‘the most degenerate Thirdness,’

where we conceive a mere Quality of Feeling, or Firstness, to represent itself to itself as Representation. Such, for example, would be Pure Self-Consciousness, which might be roughly described as a mere feeling that has a dark instinct of being a germ of thought. This sounds nonsensical, I grant. Yet something can be done toward rendering it comprehensible.

Peirce attempted this rendering in the form of a thought-experiment:

Imagine that upon the soil of a country, that has a single boundary line thus ○ and not ○○ or ◎, there lies a map of that same country. This map may distort the different provinces of the country to any extent. But I shall suppose that it represents every part of the country that has a single boundary, by a part of the map that has a single boundary, that every part is represented as bounded by such parts as it really is bounded by, that every point of the country is represented by a single point of the map, and that every point of the map represents a single point in the country. Let us further suppose that this map is infinitely minute in its representation so that there is no speck on any grain of sand in the country that could not be seen represented upon the map if we were to examine it under a sufficiently high magnifying power. Since, then, everything on the soil of the country is shown on the map, and since the map lies on the soil of the country, the map itself will be portrayed in the map, and in this map of the map everything on the soil of the country can be discerned, including the map itself with the map of the map within its boundary. Thus there will be within the map, a map of the map, and within that, a map of the map of the map, and so on ad infinitum. These maps being each within the preceding ones of the series, there will be a point contained in all of them, and this will be the map of itself. Each map which directly or indirectly represents the country is itself mapped in the next; i.e., in the next [it] is represented to be a map of the country. In other words each map is interpreted as such in the next. We may therefore say that each is a representation of the country to the next map; and that point that is in all the maps is in itself the representation of nothing but itself and to nothing but itself. It is therefore the precise analogue of pure self-consciousness. As such it is self-sufficient. It is saved from being insufficient, that is as no representation at all, by the circumstance that it is not all-sufficient, that is, is not a complete representation but is only a point upon a continuous map.

— Peirce, EP2:161-2, CP 5.71

Practical alchemy

Conscious observance of explicit laws or teachings is only the beginning of practice, or of transformation. The Sufi sage Rumi explains this in the prose introduction to the fifth book of his Masnavi, summarized thus by Franklin Lewis (2000, 37):

Rumi uses alchemy as an analogy. The theories behind the transmutation of metal as learned from a teacher or a book are like the laws of religion. One needs to know these before one can begin walking down the path, but one only comes to see how the theory applies to real life as one walks the Sufi path. It is in the experience of the spiritual path that we actually apply the chemical agents to the metal, as it were. Only by following the path to the end can we turn the actual copper into gold and attain the truth.

The turning signs here begin as alchemical symbols but end in a transformation of practice. A similar point, perhaps, is made in Matthew 19.16-17:

And, behold, one came up to him, saying, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do, to have eternal life?’ And he said unto him, ‘Why do you ask me about what is good? One there is who is good. If you would enter life, keep the commandments.’

(RSV)

There is one life that is good, not one deed that buys you eternal life. To make that one life yours takes continuous practice, incorporating many ‘commandments’ at once for the sake of that life itself and not for some future reward. This passage in Matthew subtly diverts the seeker’s attention from the “teacher” as representative of eternal life to the seeker’s own enactment of it. The Gospel of Thomas is much more emphatic on this point.

A woman from the crowd said to him, ‘Blessed are the womb which bore you and the breasts which nourished you.’ He said to her, ‘Blessed are those who have heard the word of the father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, “Blessed are the womb which has not conceived and the breasts which have not given milk.”’

— Thomas 79 (Lambdin)

The first two verses here are almost identical to Luke 11:27-8. What does it mean to keep the word (logos)? Both the English ‘keep’ and the Greek word for ‘those who keep’ (phylassontes) might suggest guarding it, defending it, keeping it safe. But for a pragmatist, the blessed are those who practice the word, not those who treat it like a possession or a “creed.” It is only through practice that the word as precept can be kept alive, because that is its only means of modifying itself to maintain its intimacy with current situations. Those whose first priority is to guard the logos often end up guarding it against any change, i.e. guarding the text against its own meaning.

The final verse in Thomas 79 throws cold water on the worshipful euphoria of the woman from the crowd, as if to say that persistent practice, and not the fleeting feeling that “life is good,” is the presence of real life.

Mindfulness

Discovery or awakening can happen instantaneously, but can have no meaning outside of a pragmatic context, a domain of continuous practice which is living the time. Maybe you ‘come to’ and suddenly realize that you’ve been absent-minded or preoccupied, and in the moment it seems that the summit of all wisdom is “Be here now.” Can you commit yourself to (lose yourself in) living by that precept? To be committed is to be preoccupied. Without the continuity between memory and anticipation, how can you be here in time?

Consider for instance the mindfulness which is central to Buddhist practice. First, a couple of definitions:

Over the years and throughout various cultures, many techniques and systems of Buddhist practice have been developed … but the essence of awakening is always the same: to see clearly and directly the truth of our experience in each moment, to be aware, to be mindful. This practice is a systematic development and opening of awareness called by the Buddha the four foundations of mindfulness: awareness of the body, awareness of feelings, awareness of mental phenomena, and awareness of truths, of the laws of experience.

— Jack Kornfield (Smith 1999, 32)

The only truths you can be aware of are general truths, which express themselves in many specific ways. Laws of experience, or of nature, are legisigns (Peirce), and have their being in futuro, since they continue to govern the unfolding of experience as of phenomenal events. Awareness in each moment takes time because each moment takes time, just as time takes mind. You don’t get in the way.

Mindfulness is best described as ‘a non-reactive, non-interfering awareness.’ It is pure knowing, without any of the projections of our ego or personality added to the knowing.

— Wes Nisker (1998, 25)

Right mindfulness accepts everything without judging or reacting. It is inclusive and loving. The Sanskrit word for mindfulness, smriti, means ‘remember.’ Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment. The character the Chinese use for ‘mindfulness’ has two parts: the upper part means ‘now,’ and the lower part means ‘mind’ or ‘heart.’

— Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 64)

Mindfulness is re-membering what has been dismembered. The Arabic term dhikr, often translated ‘remembrance,’ is an Islamic equivalent to smriti, and a Christian version is the Greek metanoia (often translated ‘repentance’) (Frye 1982, 130). All refer to a kind of resurrection, a coming back to life, a return to presence.

In the ‘kingdom’ the eternal and infinite are not time and space made endless (they are endless already) but are the now and here made real, an actual present and an actual presence. Time vanishes in Jesus’ ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ (John 8:58); space vanishes when we are told … that the kingdom is entos hymon (Luke 17:21), which may mean among you or in you, but in either case means here, not there.

— Frye (1982, 130)

How could you remember to come back to presence if memory were not already a mode of presence? But then – felix culpa! – how could we return if we had never left? In order to remember we must first forget.

The train that can be expressed is not the express train. You cannot be trained to express it. You express it only in your continuous practice.

You can’t catch up with time. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t need to catch up with time, because it’s carried you all along, and it doesn’t run ahead of living. The impression of lagging behind is caused by your reluctance to let go of permanence in the act of remembrance.

Walking the waking

For thousands of years you’ve banged your head against a problem, or against a world that refuses to answer your best questions. Then you go to sleep, or into a trance, or on a spirit journey – dropping body and mind, dropping your routines, or at least dropping the problem. Then you return, and there’s the answer! You may have learned to say that it came from the spirit world, or the Muses, or God, or that your body knew it. What difference does it make what you say about it? It’s what you do with the answer that counts. A ‘religious experience’ may startle you out of your slumber, but it doesn’t take hold until you begin to live by it.

To really believe it is to belive it.

In practice-enlightenment (Dogen), the whole mind is physically realized, and the whole body psychically realized. Now realization continues by dropping off mind and body.

There goes the judge

A guidance system composed of explicit precepts would be an artificial one. Understanding someone’s ethos requires much more than knowledge of their expressed beliefs. To read a precept pragmatically is to form the concept of living by this precept. When you compare your concept with the actual practice you observe among professed believers in the precept, you may observe discrepancies. You could easily leap to the conclusion that those who profess to follow the precept are hypocritical. But it’s also possible, given the fact of polyversity, that their reading of it differs from yours. To understand how they read it, you would have to study their guidance system as a whole and observe how the specific precept fits into that system.

Values are part of the modeling process. Anything we can evaluate – approach or avoid, save or condemn, worship or despise – can only be a feature of a model, valued according to its role as a functional part of that model which is its context. We can only evaluate people’s conduct in relation to a common (communal) guidance system. To evaluate someone else’s model, then, you would have to reduce it to a feature in your own concept of the universal guidance system. But what if each of us sentient beings is a single bodymind doing one’s best to make sense of a unique body of experience? Judge not, lest you be judged.