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.

Meaning what you read

Facts or beliefs, once formulated, are in the public domain; but their actual meanings cannot be made public.

Only you personally can mean, at the moment, the sign you are reading. You can do that by investing in it your own experience of the object of the sign. That is the water of life which can revive the dry bones of a published text. But that’s a third-person view. From your point of view as reader, what you do is to let the text speak from experience. Without this ‘letting it mean’, the text is just a bag of tricks and traps – canned information, facts, opinions, stories and so forth. Reading those things into the text, rather than ‘letting it mean,’ is another kind of trap, though. For a maxim that might avoid both traps, try this: Let your body mean the text.

Real learning can occur only in dialogue with one’s body.

— Gendlin (1981, 160)

Gendlin’s ‘focusing’ technique requires the practitioner to let the answers to her questions come from her body, rather than getting caught in a repetitive verbal routine. The body, then – rather than some external authority figure, or some ‘visionary’ projection – is trusted as the source of revelation which can turn into new guidance. Once this has been grounded in the practice of attending to the immediately felt body, then the habitual boundaries we draw around what can be felt as ‘body’ can fall away. Perhaps it is only when the whole earth is your body that you can really learn from scientific inquiry. And only when precepts are realized in the practice of interaction with other earthlings can you really learn what they mean.

Spinning

In Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus (metaphorical son of the archetypal ‘artificer’) addresses himself as ‘weaver of the wind.’ Weaving and spinning (as threadmaking) are both handy metaphors for the construction of meaning. But there is another sense of “spin” (based on a different metaphor) that we need in any good account of how language works.

The metaphor of spin or bias refers vaguely to a speaker’s more or less subtle (and often unconscious) attempts to manipulate the emotional interpretant while maintaining some semblance of truth in the sign-object relation. When a word is used frequently with a special emotional overtone, the spin tends to stick to the word as an undertone persisting in other uses. Some examples:

“Progress,” as a noun, puts a positive spin on the idea of a progression, i.e. a forward motion: we generally use it in reference to a sequence in which later points (or states) are improvements over earlier points in the sequence. The same happens with “success”: it generally refers to a positive outcome of a succession of acts.

We see the same pattern in the evolution of “happy” in English. Things happen; if the outcome is positive for us, if our luck is good, then the events are “happy” or “lucky”; and we describe our own resulting state in the same terms. (In English, the usage of “happy” as referring to events rather than emotional states has almost disappeared, but we still use “lucky” both ways.) Similarly “fortune” can be kind or unkind, and someone who “tells your fortune” may bring good news or bad news, but if you are “fortunate,” that means the news is good.

Other words have gone in the opposite direction. “Fate” usually has ominous overtones, probably because it is beyond our control, and a “fatal” event, in current usage, is about as negative as anything can be.

A successful translation from one language into another would translate the spin of each phrase as well as its more “objective” reference – but the shifting relationships between sense and spin are rarely parallel across languages, and even differ between people. This is yet another reason why a perfectly “successful” translation is an ideal that can hardly be realized.