Robert J. Lifton died.
Dr. Lifton suggested that a new kind of person was emerging, with new tools for adaptation, a product of the breakdown of traditional institutions and the threat of human extinction. He christened this new being Protean Man, named for Proteus, the Greek god who constantly changed forms. (--NYT obituary)
It is time to change form.
As form is emptiness, emptiness form.
*(naneun god jug-eul geos gat-eunde nae ma-eumdo moleugess-eo) (I asked for “soon dead” and “don’t know mind” and it gave me Korean that says "I'm going to die soon and I don't even know my heart"
I might be ignorant, but I’m aiming to not know.
Ignorance is not exactly not knowing.
Ignorance is actually that we know something really,
Really well,
But it's the wrong thing.
To not know means I don't use my knowing to kill this moment.
I don't clobber the moment with all my knowing,
All of my expertise,
--Frank Ostaseski, in Learning to Live Fully, Tricycle
Zen master used
to say “Soon dead”
He was right
“soon” is dead
At its obsequies
no one came
all slowly, thereafter
belatedly gone
“Cherish those that seek the truth but beware of those that find it.”
-- Voltaire
Watched some of the hearing with the Secretary of Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr.
Something is very wrong.
If someone told me to upend truth, I would ask Mr. Kennedy to do that job.
I’m sure time will correct the imbalance he exemplifies.
I prefer to think that the abnormality personified by Mr Trump and his surrounding henchmen is only a temporary sickness that will come to its end with time and increasingly astute scrutiny.
We are not as stupid as they prefer us to be. They cannot defeat time and decency.
They have found their truth of burying the truth and that makes them sickeningly certain of their dominance and inevitable victory.
But they are deluded.
They cannot endure.
Compare Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) brilliant essay,
“About Truth and lie in the extra-moral sense.” (June 1873, about 151 years ago). “In some remote corner of the universe, which was poured out flickering in innumerable solar systems, there was once a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. It was the most haughty and mendacious minute of "world history": but only a minute. After a few breaths of nature, the star froze, and the clever animals had to die.” (--in Martin Heidegger as Interrogator: The Final Paradigm, by Daniel Fidel Ferrer)
These people lack interior insight, that which is not manipulable nor grandiose. Interior insight is the ability to look within and see that which has no exterior manipulative usefulness, only what is true in itself, that which creates and nurtures the ding an sich, that which is in itself Itself.
They grasp for what is easy.
Τὶ εὔκολον; Τὸ ἄλλῳ ὑποτίθεσθαι. Tì eúkolon? Tò állōi hupotíthesthai. "What is easy? To advise another." — Thales
They cannot comprehend that what is difficult is to allow oneself to be educated by αυτοφωτισμός (aftofotismós) (self-illumination), to be advised by τι είναι αλήθεια από μόνο του (ti eínai alítheia apó móno tou ) (what is true in itself.) It has nothing to do with the manipulation of another.
These charletons.
They are too clever.
They are noise and smoke.
Do not be fooled!
Chapter 6: Tolerance without Resentment
The Buddha said, “When a malicious person hears about
goodness and intentionally comes to provoke trouble, you should
restrain yourself; do not be angry or reprimand him. Evil deeds
will fall back upon the evil-doer.”
Going about my business, listening to The Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Hegel, I hear the words "In the void, nothing is known."
And I am intrigued.
Does it suggest that that in the void "nothing" is known? Or the opposite? That not-knowing is the essence of the void?
That not-knowing is most intimate?
Dizang asked Fayan, "Where are you going?"
Fayan said, "Around on pilgrimage."
Dizang said, "What is the purpose of pilgrimage?"
Fayan said, "I don't know."
Dizang said, "Not knowing is most intimate."
-- Zoketsu Norman Fischerhttps://everydayzen.org/teachings/not-knowing-is-most-intimate/
Weary of the blah, blah, blah of the cultural/political instigations and posturing of the majority of DC provocateurs, I content myself with denser diversion and intellectually intriguing possibilities in philosophy and spirituality. I prefer my own unintelligible investigation.
I find this paper:
Law entails its own inversion, Hegel tells us: the law of electricity necessitates its positivity and negativity together as one; the law of against murder entails the constituting the crime, the punishment, and the absence of murder as a positively existing condition, all together in one totality (Hegel 2018: 96).10 Hegel makes a very simple remark about this situation, one which we’ve already touched on. The beyond is the simple turning-away of immediate objective existence from itself. To say that the laws of the world are beyond the immediately sensible world says nothing else than that this immediate world possesses negativity within itself. Immediate objects automatically exclude us from them; further, they (the objects) posit a beyond that mediates the differentiation of themselves. The world immanently excludes itself from itself, positing a beyond of itself from within itself. Thus, this supersensible realm that I must by necessity presuppose is not negatively nothing. It is the positive nothing that belongs to the objective world as such; it is what Hegel calls the “void:”
in the void, nothing is known… because it is defined as the very other-worldly beyond of consciousness… Suppose we are nonetheless to take there to be something in the void after all; this is a void which came about as the void of objective things but which now must be taken both as emptiness in itself, or as the void of all spiritual relations, or even as the void of the differences of consciousness as consciousness – and if the void is taken as this complete void, which is also called the holy, nonetheless there is supposed to be something with which to fill it out, even if it is only filled out with daydreams, or with appearances which consciousness itself creates. If so, then consciousness would just have to rest content with being so badly treated, for it would deserve no better, while daydreams themselves are still better than its emptiness (Hegel 2018: 87). 11
The other-worldly-beyond of the understanding is just the negation of this understanding within the world. This amounts to everything we have already proposed: the understanding demands its own negation, its own exclusion. But, furthermore, it is the void of consciousness as positively determined in the structure of the objective world. The understanding is slowly approaching its act of self-exclusion, in terms of the self- exclusion of the world. The holy is the daydreaming of the understanding; the real existence of illusion in the world, the truth of which is the frozen night of the world, constitutive of consciousness as such. That emptiness which the understanding wants to fill its own errors with is the nullity of the world to itself. The understanding had to posit the supersensible world of law as the determining principle of its own experience, but the consequence is that the differentiation of objects in the world is the world differentiating itself and thereby explicitly determining the possibility of error, the partiality of objects according to their property-being or their thing-being.
(-- from Hegel's Understanding: Absence, Accident, Alienated by Virgil Lualhati McCorgray, University of Georgia, United States, in International Journal of Zizek Studies, Volume 15 Number 3)
Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with this:
"ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things."
https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html
And the question arises for me, is the desire to know a reluctance to not-know? If not-knowing is most intimate, is there a built-in avoidance of intimacy in our desire to know? Is the second noble truth -- “that suffering is caused by craving (or tanha), which includes desire, attachment, and aversion to sensory pleasures, existence, and non-existence" (AI) a clarification of a way of being that might be more advantageous to our human experience -- namely, to live without craving or desire is (paradoxically) a more radically desirous way of being for us?
Is desire itself different from desiring something? Is ignorance itself different from not knowing something?
A student I am working with is studying Śūnyatā.
In Buddhism, śūnyatā (Sanskrit for "emptiness") is the concept that all phenomena, including the self, lack inherent, independent existence and are instead interdependent and constantly changing. It doesn't mean "nothingness," but rather that things are empty of fixed, isolated reality, existing only in relation to causes and conditions. Understanding śūnyatā is a profound insight that leads to the cessation of suffering by freeing one from attachment and clinging. (AI)
As the world changes, I change. As I change -- does the world change?
Is attempting to know “other” -- is the desire to possess, manipulate, or occupy “the other” -- a formula for detached being, alienation, aloofness, and coldness?
Is intimacy authentic suffering? Is the icon of the Bodhisattva of compassion, the one who hears the cries of the world, an example of authentic suffering different from the artificial suffering of our personal desires?
Is desirelessness an entranceway to the type of suffering pointed to in the Christ story, in the Bodhisattva ideal wherein communion and community -- a mystical body incorporating and incarnating our nascent wholeness -- is a reality where nothing is known?
Where nothing is known . . . (with all the ambiguity and seeming contradictoriness involved) . . . is everything loved?
Is this why Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Jesus are so difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to follow?
Is this why true and profound intimacy is such a strange notion to the ordinary way we view the world?
My doctrine is to think the thought that is unthinkable, to practice the deed that is non-doing, to speak the speech that is inexpressible, and to be trained in the discipline that is beyond discipline.
Those who understand this are near; those who are confused are far. The Way is beyond words and expressions, is bound by nothing earthly. Lose sight of it an inch, or miss it for a moment, and we are away from it.
-- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters, in dailyzen
Brew coffee
Forget news
Try something else
Not sleeze and riches
Listen to Zen Physics
The Science of Death,
the Logic of Reincarnation
c.2012 David Darling
Sidestep the crude
Let first family accrue billions
It’s beyond you, let them grift
they are so good at it
no, for us, the hoi polloi,
life is not luxurious, not
full of coverup and payoff
but, rather, coffee and donuts
and sitting in chapel-zendo
walking vespers, lighting
incense, two candles, turning
hourglass, watching
hola !
life
with
grace
Sex trafficking
Is ok with Donald Trump
Maybe he will re-think
This awfulness
Maybe rivers will turn
And run backwards
the point of prayer
is silence
stillness
where nothing
happens (astoundingly)
until the heart bows
with reverence at
the simplicity of it
no one likes a liar
(that’s a lie)
we love liars
they’re so unreliable
you never know
what they’ll say
which end run
around truth
we’re learning a lot
about lying
how truth is cheap
bought and sold
by creeps who
don’t care, don’t dare
face veracity
their scarcity
their empty soul
equally empty eyes
their disguise
tries to mask their death
never having learned
truth tellers cannot die
Maybe Texas National Guard
Will fight Illinois Guard
In the streets
Trump will declare
Martial Law and that
Will be that
The rest of us
Will buy groceries
And wait it out
The end of democracy,
Voting, and whatever
It was we once knew
thought about buying a car
found out it costs money
in dooryard, my old pickup
needing inspection and work
we know one another
thinking about fixing it
like any relationship
the cost of continuance
Woke up thinking of Alcibiades.
Alcibiades (born c. 450 BCE, Athens [Greece]—died 404, Phrygia [now in Turkey]) was a brilliant but unscrupulous Athenian politician and militarycommander who provoked the sharp political antagonisms at Athens that were the main causes of Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War(431–404 BCE).
…
In 412 Alcibiades helped stir up revolt among Athenian allies in Ionia, on the west coast of Asia Minor, but Sparta now turned against him, and he moved to Sardis to exercise his charm on the Persian governor. When some Athenian officers in the fleet began to plan an oligarchic coup, he held out hopes that if the democracy was overthrown he could secure financial support from Persia. In this he failed and, discarded by the oligarchs who had seized power, he was recalled by the Athenian fleet, which remained loyal to the democracy and needed his abilities. From 411 to 408 he helped Athens to a spectacular recovery, defeating the Spartan fleet in the Hellespont at Abydos (411) and Cyzicus (410) and regaining control over the vital grain route from the Black Sea. These successes encouraged him to return in 407 to Athens, where he was welcomed with enthusiasm and given supreme control of the conduct of the war. In a typically bold gesture he led the procession to the Eleusinian festival by road in spite of the danger from the Spartan force at Decelea, but, in the same year, after a minor naval defeat in his absence, his political enemies persuaded the people to reject him, and he retired to a castle in Thrace. He remained, however, a disturbing influence on Athenian politics and destroyed any hopes of a political consensus. When the Athenians at Aegospotami (405) facing the Spartans in the Hellespont grew increasingly careless, he warned them of their danger. But he was ignored, and, when the Athenians lost their whole fleet in a surprise attack by the Spartan admiral Lysander, Alcibiades was no longer safe in his Thracian castle. He took refuge in Phrygia in northwestern Asia Minor with the Persian governor, who was induced by the Spartans to have him murdered.
Perhaps the most gifted Athenian of his generation, Alcibiades possessed great charm and brilliant political and military abilities but was absolutely unscrupulous. His advice, whether to Athens or Sparta, oligarchs or democrats, was dictated by selfish motives, and the Athenians could never trust him enough to take advantage of his talents. Moreover, the radical leader Cleon and his successors carried on a bitter feud with him, which at the critical period undermined Athenian confidence. Alcibiades could not practice his master’s virtues, and his example of undisciplined and restless ambition strengthened the charge brought against Socrates in 399 of corrupting the youth of Athens.
—Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alcibiades-Athenian-politician-and-genera
History has had its share of figures whose allegiances and ambition rifled the course of nations, states, and persons’ lives.
There’s a troubling example of that in the United States these days.
Ah, history, we hardly know ya!
Leap Before You Look
-- by W. H. Auden (1940)
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.
The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.
The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.
Much can be said for social savoir-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.
Well, that’s that. No wearing white after Labor Day
Listen to Keith Olbermann on Tommy John surgery
Read about Bobby Shantz soon to be 100, he lives
Where I lived in Pennsylvania
The quiet of it! September first on sunporch with cats
The quiet of it, bees purpling morning moist
Of course we are poor passing facts
Remaining nameless, dog barking on mountain
Amidst a thousand clouds and ten thousand streams
There lives one ex-scholar,
By day wandering these green mountains
At night coming home to sleep beneath a cliff
Suddenly spring and fall have already passed by
And no dust has piled up to disturb this stillness
Such happiness, what do I depend on?
Here it’s as tranquil as autumn river water.
Han Shan (~ 730) in dailyzen
august 31 is new year’s eve
tomorrow, September, begins anew
drawing down summer, arising autumn
recalling when I stepped into classrooms
that first day of classes, the newness
now an old man, reading Philo, Hegel,
Maseo Abe, Thomas á Kempis, Sunday
New York Times, Philosophy Now,
The New Yorker --- just to keel, keep hand in
on off-chance someone asks for lecture
I could tell them something un-understandable
asking them to ponder incomprehensible things
like someone beyond Being wandering trail
up and around mountain, on roads, in dooryard --
my mind has gone on walkabout, listens to
unfamiliar, sees without understanding
takes joy in absence of felicity, content
with obscure curiosity, the passing breeze
say nothing
watch sun on leaves
breeze wavering
branches
these two children
killed in church
leaf and sunny rustling
Minneapolis to Maine
Sunday morning coffee
Irish cap, New York Times
companioning sorrow
tears
sit with me
dear children
we will watch
two cats walk though
one brown dog
aground in dooryard
they, too, know you
know they love you
