Category: Symbols Turning

If the natural world is ‘the primary scripture’ (Berry 1988, 105), the quality of our presence on this planet depends on how we read the earth and practice what it preaches. As for our reading of the secondary scriptures, our judgments of their relative worth are worthless; what counts is the practice our reading determines, the turning of the symbols we are. Continue reading Turning the Dharma wheel

All messages are coded, and that includes scientific and scriptural texts as well as everyday communications in ordinary language. Use of a symbolic code both amplifies and ambiguates (or polyverts) the meaning of the sign. Michael Polanyi explains: Continue reading Risky symbols

Metaphors of ‘nature as books’ are not only inaccurate, they are pernicious.

— Gary Snyder (1990, 69)

True enough; but there is common ground between reading the Word and reading the world, for both are read by the one bodymind. Continue reading The Book of nature

That which is unexpressed by the word, that by which the word is expressed, know That to be the Brahman and not this which men follow after here.

— Kena Upanishad (Aurobindo)

Wipe your glosses with what you know.

— Finnegans Wake, 304

Continue reading What do you know?

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

— Joyce, Ulysses (45)

What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jeté is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 70)

According to Popper (1968, 174), ‘every language incorporates and preserves countless myths and theories, even in its grammatical structure.’ Science begins when myths and theories become self-modifying. ‘There is much less accumulation of knowledge in science than there is revolutionary changing of scientific theories.… science advances by the tradition of changing its traditional myths.’

Kuhn on the other hand says that ‘normal science’ consists of filling in the details of established theories, that revolutions are exceptional. Vague as they are, these are quantitative estimates, and perhaps we can account for the difference between them by considering what their respective authors chose to count. Kuhn is looking primarily at the everyday lives of ordinary working scientists: Popper might agree that their work may not advance science very much, and Kuhn would certainly agree that normal science prepares the ground for the revolutions which really advance it. The disagreement here is similar to the debate about “gradualism” vs. “saltations” or “punctuated equilibrium” in biological evolution; or the debate among Buddhists about whether “enlightenment” is sudden or gradual.

For Peirce, the scientific method was the only reliable approach to truth, in the long run. The ‘method of authority,’ as he argued in his 1877 essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’, can be effective in establishing social consensus or unifying a community, but ‘the notion of any weight of authority being attached to opinions in philosophy or in science is utterly illogical and unscientific’ (EP2:206). Continue reading Authority and inquiry

Outside of an actual conversation with a specific partner in a current situation, an ideal writer would have nothing to say; while an ideal reader would see the truth in every sign (as well as its insufficiency), by seeing how it suits the situation.

Philip August Boeckh, writing around 1866, formulated the principle that the value of theory lies ‘in its capacity to bring unconscious activity to the level of consciousness’ (Mueller-Vollmer 1985, 133). Continue reading On meaning consciously

A bit of 20th-century scripture:

Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

These words have been widely quoted since the 1970s, and encapsulate much of the ecological awareness developing since then. They are usually attributed to ‘Chief Seattle,’ and thus taken to speak for authentic Native American culture. The real story (like the web of life) is a little more complex.
Continue reading The web of life