Songs on Sunday: Introduction to Zen Buddhism

First, there is a mountain,
Then, there is no mountain,
Then, there is.



The caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within.



Would you like more of an explanation?

No? Fine. Have some philosophy of politics and some logic.

Yes? Okay.

As I see it, we begin with our natural habit of labelling. This here, this is a mountain. Once we have been properly socialised, when we therefore see said physical manifestation (hills notwithstanding) we 'see' the label of mountain.

After, we have analysed this thought process, this socialisation of identification, we might then see the landmark and having unlearned what we have learned 'see' no mountain. Seeing instead what is there, which is not what the human language label says, it is not literally mountain as this is merely our language code for identification. Nor is it der Berg or le Montagne or Yama or any other language's term. What it is, is not a linguistic term. Through philosophical thought you have negated the linguistic mountain, now there is now no mountain.

But it is still there. It is after all existent reality. There is a large rock* there, you see it. (*Yes, it's not just a 'rock' but 'rocky shape' sounds no better) You have not made the mountain by naming it, it always had existence as it has existed, and one way of taking the 'third phase' here (as many do) is that the Zen Buddhist has 'over-intellectualised' matters and has now (in the third phase) returned to 'true' direct reality.

I think that this is not the case. It is not a matter of returning to the status quo unchanged. When we return to the 'there is' we are returning now (having been through phases one and two) as one whose usage of 'mountain' now accepts that it is a human label used merely as a tool for communication (i.e. what language is) rather than the true meaning of the existent 'object'. Existence lives around us, with us or without us, with language or without. There is a mountain.

In blogs past: The Phenomenology of Death

Here's a positively ancient blog post from way back in 2008 when I was a Masters student of Aesthetics.

I found the novella 'The Blind Owl' purely by my habit of roaming about interesting sections of the library and I'm glad that I did. I think a re-reading is on the cards and I'm fairly confident that the excellent National Library of Scotland will provide...

The Phenomenology of Death

The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hadayat

The Blind Owl has been interpreted in various ways; as a treatment of the author’s addiction, a reaction against the authoritarian regime of Reza Shah’s Iran, a work of existential psychology dealing with the author’s unease of the female and attraction/repulsion thereof (although the latter is a basic Freudian analysis and, by my opinion, not up to much). However, this short piece will not attempt to give such a broad generalisation for such a complex story as the Blind Owl (as one could easily bring up ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts concerning enlightenment, the mythology of owls, the history of Persia etc). Rather I will focus upon what is a definite ‘thread’ throughout Sadeq’s novella, that of the phenomenology of death. It is not to be doubted that all the other themes mentioned (even the Freudian) play a role, but to reduce the story to only one message is to destroy it. The confusion of powerful images gives it its coherence (we might think of Rimbaud’s poetry as a similar example).

The work is entirely poetic and should be understood as such, for example when Sadeq has he character say that he, “felt a pleasant pain.” When I say this you would understand me, but logically it is a nonsense for pleasure and pain are opposites such as cold and heat. We can all understand quite what a pleasant pain is describing, this is quite a basic example, but the work is full of more complex poetic juxtapositions. Death is a metaphor for the living, we cannot know it. To talk about it poetically makes sense, to talk about it factually we have to be indirect, discuss its effect and so forth. Here Sadeq considers death it what it means to us. That is, how it effects our life (thus phenomenologically).

At this moment my thoughts froze. A unique, singular life was created in me, because my life was bound to all the existences that surrounded me, all the shadows that trembled around me. I felt an inseparable, deep relation with the world, with the movement of all creatures and with nature. All the elements of myself and of nature were related by the invisible streams of some mind-disturbing, agitating current. No thought or image was unnatural for me. I could understand the secrets of the ancient paintings, the mysteries of difficult, philosophical treatises, and the eternal foolishness of forms and norms, because at this moment I was participating in the revolution of the earth and the planets, in the growth of the plants, and in the activities of the animal world. The past and the future, far and near, shared my sentient life and were at one with me.

At such times everyone takes refuge in a strong habit, or in a scruple that he has developed in his life: the drunkard becomes drunk, the writer writes, the stone-cutter cuts stones, each giving vent to his anxiety and anger by escaping into the strong stimulant of his own life. And it is in moments like these that a real artist can create a masterpiece.

It is with this, and at various encounters throughout the novella, that the narrator encounters the immediate potency of one’s own death. That it is I that will die, the realisation floods one with an anxiety that empowers or destroys. With acceptance one can “create a masterpiece” and it is only with this facing up to one’s (everyone’s) mortality that the world can be understood to make sense, thus the participation in everything. This ‘enlightenment’ moment obviously has links with Hinduism and Buddhism, and also with the philosophy of Heidegger and the French existentialists, but it is not a philosophical treaty masquerading as a story. The existential plight of the main character is palpable and considered one of the reasons it was banned for so long.

The dream-like imagery of the novella crowds in and overwhelms the reader (especially during the frantic second part), in effect the over emphasis upon the highly powerful sensory images and descriptions used by Sadeq stun. The language is so intense that it dissolves itself and we are left with the ‘feeling’ of dread, with the struggle of the ‘painter’ (the narrator) the make sense of the world. Who is the girl? His Wife, death itself, addiction/sickness, love, all of these. With his over determination upon language (his attempts to explain) we find that incessant describing is precisely because of its own insufficiency. The ideal then must be silence (death?) “I always thought forbearance from speech was the best of things.” And in this end it is death that “never lies” whereas with speech we constantly make dreams and images that continue to confuse.

The whole novella is a cycle, a dream within a dream. Complex and multi-layered, it's own over abundance of imagery reduce it to the silent image of a corpse.

31/07/08

Saturday is Shah-t'day: Some more Idries Shah selections

KNOWING HOW TO KNOW
A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition
by Idries Shah
The Octagon Press: London, 1998

Previous post, HERE.

HUMAN DUTY

To help others, to try to be kind and to avoid cruelty, to heal the sick and to protect the weal: these are among the elementary social, not spiritual, duties incumbent upon man as a social animal.
Those who have confused social uplift and psychological ministrations with 'higher' endeavour, end up being in a state of bewilderment or forced into sophistry when they find that they no longer have the monopoly of social service.
The fault is at least partly theirs; they should not so readily have taken the easy way of equating something 'other' with something merely civilised.


STUDENTS

A teaching attracts an artificial selection of students (those interested in the way in which the teaching is projected) unless its sponsors are careful to prevent this.
No 'teaching' with a single dogma or unified message can avoid processing its adherents.


Selections from SOCIAL CONCERN

"If you love other people, for instance, because it is you who really want to be loved, you are not loving at all, and people (especially the object of that 'love') will hate you, at least in part, and will turn against you, perhaps by turning against your dearest beliefs or practices. There is something in men which can detect real love."

"Knowledge may not be superior to love, but it is the essential prerequisite. If you do not understand, you cannot love. You can only imagine that you love."


TO BE REMEMBERED

People in history who were bad are remembered much more than people who tried to make others bad. The same is not the case with goodness. You will notice, if you care to verify this, that it is not the people who were only good who are remembered, but the people who told others to be good, whether they themselves were so or not.


THERE COMES A TIME

There always comes a time when instruction-materials originally employed to direct the attention of certain people towards a certain aim are adopted as 'gospel', or else simplified out of all usefulness and shallowly interpreted.
An example of the latter is the current idea of the meaning of Diogenes' looking with a lamp in broad daylight for an honest man.
People think that he did this to indicate how rare were honest men. In fact, this procedure is a perfectly obvious example of directing attention to the whole question: not only to the rarity of honest men, but to the whole question as to how they might be found.


THE INFLUENCE OF TEACHING

The influence of teaching is very little greater than the capacity of its pupils. When pupils are mainly of low quality, teaching momentum is lost, and the pupils dominate what is taught. The teacher has to select, therefore, who can best benefit, for the sake of all.


WORDS AND VIOLENCE

First, man had no words. The he learned to use words instead of physical violence.
Now he uses words to lead him into violence. He has to unlearn the misuse of words. He has to learn the use of the physical and of words. This is the creature which is called man.


WHAT SELF-EXAMINATION IS

Keep a journal. Write daily about the things that happen to you or strike you as significant. Start studying it after a lapse of time and see how your behaviour was partly due to a desire for self-inflation. Also try to see what useful or interesting concomitants there were to each event.

Mystical Mondays: Idries Shah, Sufi philosopher

Idries Shah

A Brief Biography

Idries Shah was a teacher in the Sufi tradition and a prolific author with over three dozen books on various topics published. Shah was born in Simla, India, in 1924 the descendant of Afghan nobility. He spent most of his life in London, but traveled extensively and his parents exposed him to a wide variety of cultures during his childhood to show him a "multiplicity of impacts." Shah later described this unconventional childhood as the "Sufi approach" to education. In 1960 he started his own publishing house, Octagon press, and in 1965 started an educational charity, the Institute for Cultural research. As of 2013 the institute has suspended its activities following the formation of a new charity, the Idries Shah Foundation. Shah died, in London, in 1996.

His Works, My Discovery

I discovered the work of Shah last year while we were moving stock on the third floor in preparation for the refurbishment. Since then I've been reading his book 'Knowing How To Know' which is described as a practical philosophy in the Sufi tradition. I appreciate the honest practical writing of Shah and will share some of the more inspiring aphorisms from that book. However, I would recommend anyone interested in mysticism, practical philosophy, or especially Sufism to seek out his works. The book was published posthumously in 1998 (the edition I have) and in paperback in 2000. It represents the completion of a series of Shah's books that, the study of which, form a course he had developed during his life.

Some selections from Knowing How To Know (1998)

Are Men Machines?

People do not like being called machines. And yet most people are not even machines in lacking faculties for evaluating the qualitative nature of experience. Instead of being able to perceive the spectrum of influences in a single experience, they feel it transcendental if it moves them. Unlike a machine, too, the human being has no switching gear to turn experience on and off. And man has no means of engendering experience except by the most hazardous trial-and-error ones such as throwing himself into random situations or ingesting drugs.

One of the purposes of a real esoteric training is first to acquire lower control, control such as a machine might have, before higher controls can be attained.

Criticism

You ask me why I criticise only one side, when I could be pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of both.

By doing so, you ignore the fact that nobody nowadays needs to write a book criticising, say, the plague virus.

Equally, when antibiotics are so well known, you merely record their efficacy or otherwise: You do not have to rhapsodise about them when this has already been done.

One must know the difference between constructive description and sheer wallowing in words.

In order to know this, one must have a basis of knowledge as to how words are used, and what is didactic and what is not.

Otherwise, you will merely be at the mercy of the conditioning power of words and personalities.

Cause and Effect

Every person must learn to ask himself:

'Am I attributing this or that thing, this appearance or that effect, to some cause or origin which may not be its cause?'

All cultures teach their people to do this in certain subjects and in a few areas. But the net result of this has been for people to do it in as few, not as many, instances as possible.

Selection from p. 81

"There is nobody more trivial than a person in authority who spends his time telling others what to do and who does not do things himself."

Emotion

How sad that people dignify their activities too much.

They use fine words to describe processes which, if only looked at in the face, would enable them to acquire some humility.

People often have to 'burn off' surplus evaporating volatile substances.

But this is still regarded as significant, because self-esteem is so powerful that a man has to conceal his absurdity and even his normal needs by using bombast.

People do not like to be described as machines. It is true that only a man - not a machine or even an ape - could go so far as to describe the processes of physics and chemistry, even electronics, in lyrical, pejorative and hallowed terms.

Every Feeling is Qualitative

If you feel love, joy, excitement, interest, focused attention, confusion, disinterest, as the result of sitting down on a pin or hearing bird sing - these and other feelings all contain some negative functions, some self-indulgent ones, and some constructive ones.

This information is the result of higher knowledge, panoramic vision, call it what you will.

You will never reach a higher aim by means of increasing the volume of feelings without any training for perception of the spectrum within feelings.

Only by the last manner of working will you isolate 'worship', 'understanding', 'love', from dross.

More, HERE.

Mystical Mondays: the poetry of Aurobindo Ghose

Aurobindo Ghose (or Ghosh) was an Indian political and revolutionary leader who became a poet, philosopher, and yogi or spiritual leader. His scholarly and socio-political work was always informed by a sense of mysticism derived from the great traditions of India. A sense that was not world-denying but world-affirming, a mysticism of presence rather than of abstraction. But this is not an essay about the works of Sri Aurobindo (his honourific title), I'll save that for a later date, today I wanted to share one of his short poems and first a quotation from an excellent collection of his work by historian Peter Heehs:

An even more direct sense of the spiritual life comes through his poetry. Like the Vedic rishis, like Yeats and Heidegger, Sri Aurobindo believed that the rhythmic language of poetry could convey meanings that went much deeper than the intellectual significance of the word. The rishis embodied their vision in 'Mantras, revealed verses of power, not of an ordinary but of a divine inspiration and source'. In The Future Poetry Sri Aurobindo showed that this heightened power of speech was not the prerogative of Sanskrit scriptures, but could be found to some degree in the poetry of any languages with a developed literature. English poetry has passed through evolutionary stages of primarily physical (Chaucer), vital (Shakespeare) and mental (Pope) inspiration. In the works of Wordsworth, Blake and other so-called Romantic poets it had sometimes risen to heights of inspiration close to what he called the mantra. He hoped that this tendency would be continued in contemporary poetry, and saw hints of this in the work of Yeats and George Russell (A.E.). But he was disappointed by most poetry published between the two world wars, considering much of the work of Eliot and other Modernists to be a relapse into mere intellectuality.

The Essential Writings of Sri Aurobindo, edited and with an introduction by Peter Heehs (Oxford: OP, 1998), xxix.

Trance

A naked and silver-pointed star

       Floating near the halo of the moon;

A storm-rack, the pale sky's fringe and bar,

       Over waters stilling into swoon.

My mind is awake in stirless trance,

       Hushed my heart, a burden of delight;

Dispelled is the senses' flicker-dance,

       Mute the body aureate with light.

O star of creation pure and free,

       Halo-moon of ecstacy unknown,

Storm-breath of the soul-change yet to be,

       Ocean-self enraptured and alone!

Love is the Law (1): Poetry of Love

Here's something a foolish boy once wrote about Love:

Poetry comes from love, not from despair or darkness, this is only self-indulgence.
Love makes everyone a poet. Love of another person makes for a short lived career, unless one keeps their larder constantly stocked, as some poets do. This view is rather narrow. It is the love of the world that is the poet's life force, the mystical love that powers the greatest poets and their greatest works.
Despair looks at a point, eyes downcast, a view inward.
Love looks all around and into eternity.

Now, although we shouldn't be too critical of the young in case it puts them off from doing some serious thinking in the future, I would say this about the above aphorism... 

And before we get too critical it could be pointed out in their defence that this is about love as it relates to poetry and not people.

However...

Love of another person... is rather narrow.

The author of this aphorism seems to find (or, more likely, imagine) that loving other individuals is lesser to the love of the world, in a mystical sense. The idea might start, as follows, that one's love of an other is always derivative to the love of the wider world as we begin with our world-love and people come later. On the other hand, maybe they want to say that people are just 'smaller' than the world and so the love for other people must always be a fraction of the mystical love for the world (so, it doesn't matter that it has primacy in order of loves but that it is greater).

Two points.

1. Mystical? Why might this be the appropriate place for the poet? Surely a poet (a lover, a human being) should be based on the experience of the world and not a transcendental experience of entirety. Well, we might say that this is part of the experience of being human (the mystical) or at least a fuller experience, or weaker, a poetic experience. At any rate there seems no strong reason for the mystical world-love to be greater than the love one might have for another human. Indeed, more positively, we might say that the love for another being is so different from the mystical world-love that one need not destroy the other. They are so remote from each other.

2. People, lesser? The strongest argument for the mystical world-love seems to reside in its ontological primacy. That is, one must begin with this to experience the lesser love for human individuals. However, why would it be logically (or emotionally, or physically) appropriate to count world-love as the first and greatest love. We learn about the world from those we love and who love and care for us as we grow. That is, from our parents and from those adults that care for us as children. We simply begin with the love of others or special individuals and only then, from them, do we learn the possibility of world-love. The mystic's world-love is derivative from the love of a child for a parent, for a person or another person. That is, if we are saying that they are related.

At least, this is true of the religious mystic. As they start with this, seemingly, world denying world-love (a paradox that drives the spirit of religious mysticism). How might one be a mystic without be religious? More about this godless mysticism later, but this mysticism need not deny the importance of the love of individuals.

Grounds for argument #1 - "Art is best experienced viewed timelessly"

[This piece and its reply are steps along the way to building a larger conception]

Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (above) is a painting that can be taken as being in response to a particular event; the Nazi bombing of said town during the Spanish civil war, and indeed in a solely historically defined, or timely fashion, this can be said to be completely correct, but in ‘reducing’ the painting to only having this sort of historical attachment removes what is its deeper more expansive force. In a sense, I want to say and this is my addition, that a true work of art and therefore a fuller aesthetic experience is one that is timeless (to use a Wittgensteinian phrase[1]). That is, that we can appreciate Guernica not because we can relate in some way its historical value but that it speaks to us (that is, it shows us) about things that are of primordial importance to the experience of human existence. The images of horror, pain and suffering without a direct cause show us something of the conflict we all face; against faceless power, against convention, and against our own historicality, that we cannot escape: The war of existence. Thus, we have here a distinction between art (timeless) and propaganda (only timely). The key point here is that propaganda is only timely, that it communicates nothing but present circumstances in an attempt to influence public opinion. Therefore, the more an artwork has of the element of timelessness the closer it is to being true art. However, I do not believe that such a work would ever be completely possible as we are always already within our own historicity. That is, there is always something attaching us to our present circumstances and that this ‘expression’ of the timeless cannot be a true expression in any categorical sense, but that it is attempting to show us something beyond.

This brings forth another point, a distinctly Wittgensteinian one, that of saying and showing (this is how Richard Shusterman in his Pragmatist Aesthetics describes it – in so many words – without referencing the obvious influence). As Shusterman says quoting Dewey, “the particular quality which unifies and thus constitutes aesthetic experience, can only be felt… and cannot be described nor even specifically pointed at.”[2] Any attempt to describe or define the aesthetic experience in words, which goes beyond just a pointing out, is an impossible task. As the aesthetic experience is an ‘immediate experience’ then this is inadequate as grounds for a justificational standard for critical judgement. That is, defining art as aesthetic experience, is defining something comparatively clear (art) by something obscure and indefinable. Thus, there is no measurement here, but if it cannot be properly described how can we define art in this manner? Shusterman answers, “a good definition of art should direct us toward more and better aesthetic experience” and “redefining art as experience liberates it from the narrowing stranglehold of the institutionally cloistered practice of fine art.”[3]

However, what of a foreign visitor viewing Picasso’s Guernica who does not have any of the Western cultural conventions of art that we all do, and for that matter what of our viewing of an ancient art from a ‘lost’ civilisation how can either make any sense without an understanding of the history? Well, this may be true and I would agree with this but then to make this all that the artwork is[4] seems to miss the point of the artwork. We do not need to know the artist’s intent (indeed, there is a strong case that we cannot ever know the artists intent) to interpret an artwork, but to ‘correctly’ interpret it? That is another matter[5].

The question should still remain, how exactly am I using timelessly as a concept? For it seems to suggest some sort of transcendent experience, that is to say, one outside of human agency. However what I am suggesting is nothing like this, perhaps it would be best to say that I am using this notion of timelessness more in a poetically metaphorical manner than philosophically conceptual, I am not suggesting something transcend of human experience. Rather, something that is timeless as ‘we’ are timeless, that is we as Humanity. Thus, the primordial experience shared by all, the experience of experience, but I do not mean this in such a vague and nebulous fashion. At least not in the context of defining art, although to call this notion a concept would be suggest that I have (like many have mistakenly done before) taken an abstract and made it a ‘thing’. Of course, I have no such intention, but I have something like this in mind, “one who lives not in time but in the present is happy” and “in order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what ‘being happy’ means.”[6] Therefore, art when viewed timelessly (rather when it exhibits this timelessness and is thus capable of being viewed timelessly) is showing us our fundamental experiential natures that is our constant running up against the ‘limits of the world.’ This could be expressed thusly, “feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical.”[7] Moreover, we might substitute mystical for an aesthetic experience quite successfully here.

---

[1] Perhaps a moment to explain this mention of Wittgenstein here, in using ‘timeless’ I am referring to section 6.4311 namely, “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.”

[2] Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, p. 57

[3] Ibid.

[4] The shadowy figure I refer to here is Hegel, but this may be an unfair characterisation.

[5] That is, what is a correct interpretation?

[6] Wittgenstein, Notebooks, pp. 74, 78.

[7] Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.45. [my emphasis]