In their introduction to Dogen’s Eihei Shingi (the collection of his writings about the organization and standard practices in a Buddhist monastery), Leighton and Okumura explain that the practice of zazen ‘promotes active attentiveness to our present life experience just as it is.’ Zen monastic life is ‘directed at helping practitioners together to embody and actualize this awareness in every aspect of ordinary life’ (Leighton and Okumura 1996, 16).
Phenomenology (and philosophy), as Peirce described it, begins with this same ‘attentiveness to our present life experience,’ but then proceeds to a description or analysis of it, with the goal of articulating what is essential to any possible experience, quite apart from anything peculiar to any individual subject of that experience. In other words, it generalizes from present experience to Experiencing. The formulations arrived at in this way furnish ‘fundamental principles’ to philosophy and other sciences (EP 2:258) in their quest for truth.
Innocence is a word for the advent of an experience before meaning arrived to subdue and relegate it to the background.
Annie Dillard (1974) writes of the ‘newly sighted,’ people given a visual world by removal of cataracts after years or lifetimes of blindness: some refused the gift of sight and space because it was too disturbing. Likewise, mind-blind autistics may reject whatever interferes with their familiar routines, preferring to remain in oblivion unless dragged out of it by the concerted efforts of others (Baron-Cohen 1995, Park 2001).
Our whole experience of the external world arrives by way of perturbations, often accompanied by a sense of loss. As Dillard says, ‘Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning’ (1974, 35). ‘The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window – silver and green and shape-shifting blue – is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn’ (36). They are mute because they turned out to be what the fluttering patch had to say, and once this has been heard, the magic is gone. We are driven out of the mythical Garden when we feel this sense of loss. Yet the emergence of meaning is hardly less amazing, when we step back from that. And those condemned to live in a world of pure ‘magic’ undiluted by memory – like Zasetsky in Luria (1972), or amnesics like Clive Wearing (Restak 1998, 29-31) – feel an even greater sense of loss, feel as if they have been dead or asleep up to now.
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.
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.
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).
