Starting point

It’s difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame.

— anon

So long as I keep before me the ideal of an absolute observer, of knowledge in the absence of any viewpoint, I can only see my situation as being a source of error. But once I have acknowledged that through it I am geared to all actions and all knowledge that are meaningful to me, and that it is gradually filled with everything that may be for me, then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science and, since we have some idea of the truth, since we are inside truth and cannot get outside it, all that I can do is define a truth within the situation.

Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 299

To seek Buddhahood apart from living beings is like seeking echoes by silencing sounds.

— Layman Hsiang (Cleary 1999, 93)

Seeking enlightenment apart from the world
Is like looking for horns on a hare.

Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)

Gist of the twist

He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will let me take it upon myself to suggest to twist the penman’s tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas.

Finnegans Wake, 482-3

Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …

Water dissolving … and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
Into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones
There is water underground

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway lead to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? … Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God! … What have I done?!

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
Into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones
There is water underground

Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground

Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Look where my hand was
Time isn’t holding us
Time isn’t after us
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
And here the twister comes
Here comes the twister
Same as it ever was …

— David Byrne, Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime

The world

The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, God is here, and I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.

— Thomas Traherne, The First Century 31

The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.

Kabir I.83 (Tagore 1915)

How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop!

Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶107

The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them.

O ESSENCE OF NEGLIGENCE!
Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance in one speech, and myriads of hidden mysteries are revealed in a single melody; yet, alas, there is no ear to hear, nor heart to understand.

Bahá’u’lláh, The Hidden Words (Persian) 16

The adventure of the universe depends upon our capacity to listen.

Swimme and Berry (1992, 44)

The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes as small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.

Tagore

Word

Vygotsky cites an incident observed by Dostoevsky in which a complex sense was carried by a single word – or rather the sign was interpreted so that only one word was needed as its verbal component. ‘When the context is as clear as in this example, it really becomes possible to convey all thoughts, feelings and even a whole chain of reasoning in a single word’ (Vygotsky 1934, 144).

A turning word is like the proverbial tip of the iceberg, or rather like the still point of a turning sign, ‘at the still point of the turning world’ which is its context.

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

Minding, not minding

The ability to concentrate attention – to be oblivious to distractions – is a sign of mind. Darwin, for instance, in his study of earthworms, noted that ‘Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light,’ and took this as an indication of mental power:

When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow – to use the expression employed by a friend – we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one. … But the different effect which a light produced on different occasions, and especially the fact that a worm when in any way employed and in the intervals of such employment … is often regardless of light, are opposed to the view of the sudden withdrawal being a simple reflex action. With the higher animals, when close attention to some object leads to the disregard of the impressions which other objects must be producing on them, we attribute this to their attention being then absorbed; and attention implies the presence of a mind. Every sportsman knows that he can approach animals whilst they are grazing, fighting or courting, much more easily than at other times. The state, also, of the nervous system of the higher animals differs much at different times, for instance, a horse is much more readily startled at one time than at another. The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison.

— Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with observations of their habits (Project Gutenberg e-text vgmld10.txt)