Author: gnox

True naming

In the beginning (Genesis 1), God creates the world by uttering it: creation is a speech act. In Genesis 2 Adam, being created in the image of God, gives all creatures their true names (see Eco 1998, ‘Languages in Paradise’). The original act of naming is the revelation which turns the use of the name into recognition. ‘The denomination of objects does not follow upon recognition: it is itself recognition’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 206). A 1934 essay by Edward Sapir explains this in terms of a ‘psychological characteristic of language’:

while it may be looked upon as a symbolic system which reports or refers to or otherwise substitutes for direct experience, it does not as a matter of actual behavior stand apart from or run parallel to direct experience but completely interpenetrates with it. This is indicated by the widespread feeling, particularly among primitive people, of that virtual identity or close correspondence of word and thing which leads to the magic of spells. On our own level it is generally difficult to make a complete divorce between objective reality and our linguistic symbols of reference to it; and things, qualities, and events are on the whole felt to be what they are called.

— Sapir (1949, 8-9)

The indexical function of a name, especially a proper name – and even more especially a divine name – resists being swallowed up its symbolic function, because that function compromises the direct apprehension or experiencing of the object so named. When apprehension is diluted by comprehension, the name loses its ‘magic’ for the community which shares that apprehension; so they are naturally apprehensive about sharing the word with outsiders! (See James N. Baker, ‘The Presence of the Name: Reading Scripture in an Indonesian Village,’ in Boyarin 1993.) This psychological tendency is probably at work in every esoteric tradition, as well as in the phenomenon of ‘taboo.’

Appearing in time

One of the enlightening night goddesses in the Gandhavyuha Sutra tells of a ‘sphere of knowledge’ beyond the cognitive bubble:

Because the sphere of knowledge of enlightening beings is utterly pure in its essential nature, it is outside the net of all conceptions, it is beyond the mountains of all obstructions. It appears in the mind and sheds light on beings who can be guided, according to their mentalities, when the time is ripe for their development.

— Cleary (1984, 1372)

It is outside the net, yet appears in the mind when the time is ripe. Its purity is its Firstness. The time is its Thirdness.

Reading the Net

Adding a search function to Turning Signs has caused me to reflect a bit on different modes of reading and the effect of the internet on them. Searching – looking for something very specific in a text or a network of texts – has been vastly speeded up and extended by access to search engines, as compared to the searching one can do in printed texts.

local browser

Browsing – meandering casually from text to text (site to site, page to page) on the chance of finding something interesting – is almost the opposite of searching, but has also been facilitated by the internet. It’s no accident that the software you are using to read this webpage is called a ‘browser’; it’s optimized for dealing with the miscellaneous. But if you have actually read this far into the page, you’ve entered a different reading mode, either skimming or scanning.

Skimming is the speed-reading mode you use for a newspaper or facebook page, when you just want to get the gist of the information offered there without getting deeply involved in the text (which you don’t expect to be carefully constructed). Scanning is a much more intense and concentrated mode in which you study the text closely without skipping over any of the details. However, even scanning does not necessarily involve the kind of deep immersion in a text that i call whole-body reading or the experiencing of a turning sign. In order to do that, you have to focus on the dynamic object of the sign through the text, in order to deepen your experience of it, your intimacy with it.

Using the internet for this last and deepest kind of reading is certainly possible, but the practice seems to get swept aside by the habits of skimming and browsing encouraged by this medium. When we do get immersed in an e-text, it’s often something we found by searching, which makes it all too likely that it will confirm our prejudices instead of challenging them. This will discourage critical thinking – which is an important part of experiencing or deep reading – unless we make a conscious effort to choose our modes of reading with care.

Turning insight

When the reading of a sign bestows a feeling of insight into the deeper process of living, i call that a turning sign.

— Only a feeling? What about real insight?

Only practice guided by the insight, and reflection on that practice, will decide whether the insight is real; but practice does not happen without feeling.

A turning sign triggers the guidance system to restructure itself. The guidance emerging can only be evaluated recursively.

The range of experience tapped in a turning sign is always greater than any number of readings will reveal.

From flow to habit

Reading is recognition of experience as symbolized by the text in its context; meaning is experiencing prompted by the text. The recognition can always become more fine-grained (subtle, articulate, ….. ) as the reading proceeds, because experiencing is never complete as long as it lives. Habits on the other hand must simplify (reducing or eliminating subtleties) in order to actualize guidance.

The text is the instrument; the body is the player; meaning is the music. Practice is the dance.

Wisdom does not accumulate; it flows in continuous current through any open channel. However, the effects of the flow can accumulate (like sediment) as instructions, constructions, obstructions, records and habits. Of course the longest-lasting effect of the flow is the channel itself. ‘The stream of water that wears a bed for itself is forming a habit’ (Peirce, EP2:418).

Here

The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned away from.

— Shitou (Tanahashi and Schneider 1994, 36)

Life makes demands

A healthy social structure, like a language, has to be massively redundant in its representations of meaning. Otherwise the loss of a single element in the social fabric would be disastrous. This redundancy is maintained by mentoring, which uses quite a lot of our energy.

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable. Perhaps this is merely to point out that life is expensive. Just to keep itself going, life makes demands on energy, supplied from inside and outside a living being, that are voracious compared with the undemanding thriftiness of death and decay. A culture, just to keep itself going, makes voracious demands on the energies of many people for hands-on mentoring.

— Jane Jacobs (2004, 159)

Really

Reality is what cannot be imaginary, but can inform your imagination like nothing else.

Whatever you have done, said, thought, deeply heard or read, has contributed something to the situation you now inhabit. And then there’s reality, which breaks into your house of habits like a thief in the night.

The sacred tree

Black Elk
Black Elk
Heraclitus complained that although the Logos is common, the many live as though they had a private understanding. This has its counterpart in a scene from the vision of the Oglala Lakota prophet Black Elk: ‘all the animals and fowls that were the people ran here and there, for each one seemed to have his own little vision that he followed and his own rules; and all over the universe I could hear the winds at war like wild beasts fighting’ (Neihardt 1932, 29). Meanwhile the sacred tree at the center of the nation’s hoop had disappeared from the vision.