Einige Kleinen Nachtmusings 02

More minimalist writings, divagations, ludibundities, and other late-night musings, musical or otherwise.

Contents:

1. The Uncertainty Principle: Heisenberg or Dogen
2. The Human-Insect Connection
3. Nickel Hall: Eine Kleine Sehnsucht
4. Process and Presence (poem)
5. One Brain But Many Rhythms
6. Rhythms Right Under Your Nose
7. Give Us This Day Our Daily . . . Rhythms
8. Mastering the Rhythms of Breath
9. The Deepest Rhythms in Your Body
10. Expansion and Contraction
11. Einstein’s E and the e of Euler
12. Dogenisms
13. Chiasmus
14. Particulars Tomorrow
15. Levity
16. Ludibundity
17. Meta-Fours à la David Spooner
18. Sea Change (poem)
19. Tat Tvam Asi
20. Pratitya Samutpada
21. Yes, That Mr. Spock
22. Process Koan
23. Gnostalgia
24. Heraclitus and Parmenides
25. The Consolations of Philosophy 
26. Trivia (poem)
27. The Order of Actualization
28. Goethe as Process Thinker
29. Jetzterday
30. Show Me
31. Performative
32. Sacraments—What’ll It Be: Wine or Tea?
33. E. F. Schumacher as a Quadratic Thinker
34. What Did It Use To Mean To Say “I Believe”?

The Uncertainty Principle:
Heisenberg or Dogen?

Way back in the 13th century, over 700 years ago, Zen Master Dogen expressed an insight that is evocative of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

　　　“When one side is illumined, the other is darkened.” *

　一方ヲ證スルトキハ。一方ハクラシ。

　　　　　(Ippo o shosuru toki wa, ippo wa kurashi.)

This does not entail dualism, nor, in denying dualism, does it imply unity.

The idea of “unity” is only a first approximation in thinking about the ultimate nature of reality. And what is beyond unity? Nonduality. The doctrine is stated succinctly in four words:

　Not one. Not two.

Or in Chinese:

　不一。不二。

Neither of these can stand alone; like yin and yang, one requires the other for completion.

If the perfect symbol of unity is a circle, the imperfect symbol of nonduality is an ellipse, which requires two foci to determine its form.

Let us take the prefix bi-, meaning “two,” and combine it with u-nity, to form “binity,” stipulating that these two do not merge but are held in dialectical tension. Held at just the right distance apart, two magnets will strain for union but will not be united.

Binities abound: yin and yang, particle and wave, electrons and protons, positive and negative poles of electricity, the double helix, right and left hemispheres of the brain, space-time, the bilateral symmetry of the human body, male and female, the I Ching, spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, permanence and change, East and West.

東　西

East　West

* From the “Genjokoan” fascicle of Dogen’s masterwork, the Shobogenzo.

*       *       *       *

The Human-Insect Connection

The emphasis that science has placed on our close “family” connection with the higher apes, a connection that becomes apparent when you visit the primate section of any zoo, can obscure the closer connection we have with insects on a developmental level or in terms of the evolution of consciousness.

I first became aware of this connection through the writings of David Spooner. One of Spooner’s main contentions is that the “primate connection has caused mainstream evolutionary theory to miss the all-round interrelationship of human development to entomology, and that this relation is enshrined in the greatest of the higher art forms and religion. There is a crucial oblique relationship between metamorphic insects and humans, a connection transmitted through the great works of music and literature, and through many of the paradigms of world religions.”

A friend with whom I aired this idea suggested that such a claim could be made only on the grounds of poetic license. There is surely something “poetic” about all this, agreed, but I believe it goes beyond poetic license.

Words with “psyche” as a component, such as psychology, express in their meanings an evocation of butterflies and an etymology that traces back to the Greek word ψυχή which signifies soul, yes, but also butterfly. If I am not mistaken, it’s the only word in Greek that does mean butterfly. The butterfly is an ancient and enduring symbol of the soul that finds cross-cultural expression in all forms of art. Twentieth-century Hispanic literature gives an almost sacerdotal role not only to butterflies, but other insects and other animals, such as frogs, that enjoy metamorphosis in their development.

There’s another etymological link between “pueblo” and “populus,” derived from the ancient Greek “papaillo,” meaning to flutter: the root of the French word for butterfly: “papillon.”

I believe people have always dimly discerned something of fundamental significance in the metamorphosis of insects and in the behavior of social insects such as bees and ants.

In metamorphosis, there’s a saltation, or a transcendence, that provides a metaphor that resonates with the soul, with the butterflies adding an aesthetic dimension that expresses the becoming of beauty.

And so I suppose what convinces me is the cumulative effect of this extensive network of interconnected meanings, one that I could keep extending, but the above examples should give a sense of the general direction.

Perhaps it would be better to claim less generality and speak not of all insects, but only those that express the fourfold cycle of complete metamorphosis. These are designated as holometabolous and this group of insects are four in number:

　1. Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths),

　2. Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps),

　3. Coleoptera (beetles), and

　4. Diptera (flies).

If the idea of developmental levels that Piaget discovered in children can be generalized to describe the growth or expansion of consciousness in adults, both individually and collectively, then two complementary processes seem to be at work: within the limits of any level, incremental growth becomes possible as the landscape of that level is explored and mapped; but the shift to a new and higher level requires a saltation, transcendence, metanoia, satori.

In our individual quests for growth, we begin as caterpillars, devouring what books, gurus, and teachers have to offer. But a deep understanding, when things start to fall into place, comes only with a chrysalitic phase wherein our slumbering dogmas are liquefied so that the imaginal cells of the new system can bring forth the butterfly of transformation.

Developmental processes, such as evolution, are impelled by at least two types of change that may be characterized as vertical and horizontal. The horizontal line is the gradual advance, step by small meandering step, sanctioned by those of a Darwinian persuasion, whereas sudden spikes give evidence of a vertical exuberance.

And so Newton’s metamorphosis of scientific thought kept scientists busy for centuries with highly interesting incremental work, whereupon Einstein comes along to invite us all to ride with him on a beam of light up to a new level. Celeritas!

Metamorphosis, a significant evolutionary breakthrough if ever there was one, exemplifies this vertical strategy and, in the case of the butterfly, does so beautifully.

In light of all this, perhaps I should sign off as —

Gregor Samsa

*       *       *       *

Nickel Hall:
Eine Kleine Sehnsucht

Nickel Hall was a small honor dorm at my alma mater, Park College, located in Parkville, Missouri. During the freshman year, all male students who lived on campus resided in Copley Hall. At the end of the freshman year, during the merry month of May, a letter of application could be sent to Nickel Hall and, if the applicant received sufficient votes, he would be invited to become a resident of Nickel dorm upon his return to campus the following fall.

And so it was that I became a proud Nickelite when I returned in September to begin my sophomore year.

Later that year we held an open house. Announcements were posted on various bulletin boards around campus. During noontime and evening meals in the Commons, where students and faculty dined, invitations were also made, but with a special twist. Some Nickelites who were studying a foreign language were asked to draft a short invitation in that language and then present it aloud, over a microphone, to the assembled students. I did the German invitation and I still remember it well. Here’s how it went —

Meine sehr geehrten Damen und Herren, sowie Fakultät: heute habe ich die Ehre ihnen mitzuteilen dass den kommenden Samstag, von neun bis elf Uhr, Nickel Haus, oder besser, die Rumpelkammer von unserer Schule, erstmals seit zehn Jahre der Publik zur Verfügung steht. Ich hoffe dass Sie alle im stände sind uns zu besuchen.

The professor of German at Park was the wonderful, redoubtable, and resourceful Frau Elsa Grueneberg. When we were in class one day, during my freshman year, I remember that she asked me a question, auf Deutsch, and, not quite understanding, I replied, also auf Deutsch:

　—Was?

And she said in her inimitable way:

　—Nicht was! Wie, bitte.

[ Note: the German word for “what” is was, pronounced voss, to rhyme with boss. ]

*       *       *       *

　　　Process and Presence

　In the beginning, once upon a void,
　A pulse, first quantum throb, felt and enjoyed:

　From the many random emerges one,
　In dipolar rhythm where before was none;
　One after another now, pulsing free—
　A social process of self-creativity.

　If, in nature, consciousness be the crown,
　Experience, at least, goes all the way down.
　In people, yes, but in photons too we find,
　As in all natural unities, the light of mind.

　And now a Presence—silent, soft as air,
　Flowing within, without, and everywhere.
　Through renewal from this divine connection
　Life endures by constant resurrection.

　Every new moment, in a twinkling of eyes,
　Numberless minds perish, and as quickly arise.
　Fresh in the flow of this interweaving stream,
　Mutual immanence is the universal theme.

　Rhythmic adventures, process ever new,
　A quantum world where time is quantum, too.
　Each quantum a threshold, another chance
　For beauty, goodness, creative advance.

　In the beginning, God and creatures meet;
　What God begins, the creatures then complete.
　This, alone, the way of God’s creation—
　Not through fiat, but by evocation.

　Power is relational, not only from above:
　Not almighty force, but all-persuasive love.

*       *       *       *

One Brain But Many Rhythms

The human brain enjoys a unique status as the most complex structure in the known universe.

Like the yin-yang symbol [, the brain is not a simple unity but a “binity” with a twofold, or two-in-one, structure: a left hemisphere (LH) and a right hemisphere (RH). The brain thus exemplifies the Buddhist concept of nonduality: not two, not one.

The two hemispheres of the brain were found to have different modes of operation, different styles, different ways of processing information. Although the distinction is not so simple, nor the polarity quite so “neat,” the general idea can be conveyed by these contrasting categories:

LH/RH

math/music
philosophy/poetry
intellect/intuition
logic/liturgy
verbal/visual

At any one time, either the LH or the RH is dominant, and at regular intervals, in a natural recurring rhythm, there is a shift back and forth between LH and RH dominance: LH → RH → LH → RH. And this leads to the last piece in the puzzle.

In addition to these rhythms, there are brain states which are categorized according to frequency: Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta. As the instrumentation for measurement becomes more sophisticated, new sub-classes of the four major categories are being found. In his book, Brain States, Tom Kenyon describes three new sub-classes of Beta: High Beta, K-complex, and Super High Beta. Might not this process be even further refined, so that we find sub-classes of the other three major categories, and maybe even new categories?

And this from neurologist John Eccles:

Each thought initiates “a river of a million sparkling synapses—like a golden loom perpetually weaving and re-weaving its way to a conclusion.”

Even when you are sleeping, the rhythms of the brain are ceaselessly active as they regulate the many autonomic processes of the body.

*       *       *       *

Rhythms Right Under Your Nose

Did you ever stop and wonder why you have two nostrils instead of one? Science has long been aware of a nasal “dominance” that alternates back and forth between the right and the left nostrils. An increase, for example, of blood circulation to the right nostril causes a tumescence, or swelling, of internal structures in the right nasal cavity, thus narrowing the air passage and restricting the flow of breath.

At the same time, the opposite process takes place in the left nostril. In short, one nostril tends to congest or close as the other becomes clear and open. This pattern repeats itself in a rhythm that oscillates back and forth, from right to left, from left to right, throughout the day. And so, an alternating current of dominance—in the nose and also, remember, in the brain.

Psychologist Debra Werntz was the first to glimpse a connection, and she went on to make this important discovery: the opening of one side of the nose activates the opposite side of the brain: thus, when the left nostril opens, the right hemisphere becomes dominant. This can be clearly seen in EEG readings of subjects who are hooked up to an electroencephalograph.

Note the elegance of this doubly biphasal process: opening the right nostril shifts dominance to the left side of the brain with its rational, analytical mode, whereas opening of the left nostril engages the more intuitive, holistic mode of the right hemisphere.

In other words, there is a perpetual oscillation between LN and RN that is mirrored, in reverse, by a perpetual oscillation between RH and LH dominance. Here we can marvel at the “wisdom of the body” in providing access to both modes, at regular intervals, so that we can achieve a more integral balance in our mental processing.

Werntz went one step further and showed that this process need not be automatic but could be consciously controlled. And Ernest Rossi, whose writings I draw on here, came up with what may be the simplest way to control the cycle. It’s as easy as lying down. For it turns out that lying on your right side will cause your right nostril to partially close, and thus activate the right hemisphere of the brain. And vice versa.

*       *       *       *

Give Us This Day Our Daily . . . Rhythms!

Some of you may be surprised to learn that we are all natural-born hypnotists and that we mesmerize ourselves, for the most part unconsciously, several times each day. It all has to do with a natural rhythm—of activity followed by  rest—that recurs throughout the day.

This rhythm undulates on all levels, from cellular to conscious experience, where there is a natural oscillation of these two contrasting states of consciousness. Although these periodic fluctuations were glimpsed by Charcot, Freud, and Jung with increasing clarity, it was Milton Erickson, one of the most innovative and influential psychologists of the twentieth century, who first clearly saw the therapeutic potential for healing. Observing how clients during the rest phase showed behavior similar to that of someone under hypnosis, he called it “the common everyday trance.” Erickson found it to be so powerful that he made it the fulcrum of his practice.

Whereas most therapists hold a 50-minute session, Erickson worked with patients for an hour and a half or more. He had observed that, during a 90-minute interval, people almost always drift into the common everyday trance, and that during these intervals, which he learned how to facilitate and deepen, a therapeutic window opened, and stayed open for 15 or 20 minutes. While the window was open, a natural healing response was activated.

Erickson became something of a legend because of his “magical” success with patients whose problems had completely baffled other therapists. This “magic” so mystified some of the media who reported on Erickson that an article about him in Time magazine was headlined as “The Sorcerer of Phoenix.”

Ernest Rossi, a psychologist who studied under Erickson for eight years and who calls himself the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, has continued to research and refine this therapeutic approach. It was he who traced how the idea developed via Charcot, Freud, and Jung, and he noted correlations with the many biological rhythms that had already been detected and were being studied by scientists, especially ultradian rhythms such as the basic rest-activity cycle (BRAC). (Circadian rhythms are those, such as wakefulness and sleep, that happen once a day. Ultradian rhythms repeat several times a day.) And speaking of sleep, it was in the study of sleep and dreams that the basic rest-activity cycle was discovered. Scientists observed a period of rapid eye movement that occurred every 90 minutes or so in subjects who were sleeping and, when awakened during this REM sleep, the subjects reported that they had been dreaming. Thus, cycles of REM sleep alternated with deep dreamless sleep throughout the night. As above, so below—as by night, so by day!

During the day, the 20-minute rest phase that recurs roughly every 90 minutes—Rossi designates this as the Ultradian Healing Response. This is nature’s way of providing a pause that refreshes, so that body and mind can recover from previous exertions, and be recharged and rejuvenated.

The UHR does not recur with automatic regularity. You can override the process by ignoring it, or by giving your focus to whatever in our sometimes hectic modern world is clamoring for your attention. But if you consistently override it, you are paving the way for what Rossi calls the Ultradian Stress Syndrome. This can lead to a downward spiral where you may find yourself experiencing such malfunctions as accident proneness, errors in judgment, memory problems, slips of the tongue, flashes of irritation, and social gaffes. And if, at this stage, you persist in ignoring the cues for rest and recovery, you can spiral down even further into such stress-related illnesses such as ulcers, migraines, impaired immune systems, strokes, and heart problems.

After much research, experimentation, and thought about this, Rossi has come to believe that “the healing traditions of many cultures—medicine man, shaman, faith healer, and hypnotherapist—all tap into our natural Ultradian Healing Response without realizing it,” and that the UHR is “the common core of all the holistic mind-body approaches to healing.” He has also broadened its application as a source for problem solving, personal growth, creative insights, and the evolution of consciousness.

If you wish to learn more about this, I recommend the following two books by Ernest L. Rossi:

The 20-Minute Break: Reduce Stress, Maximize Performance, and Improve Health and Emotional Well-Being Using the New Science of Ultradian Rhythms

The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis

*       *       *       *

Mastering the Rhythms of Breath

The Chinese term for breath is composed of two characters:

呼吸

hū　xī

Hū, the first character (and this primacy of position tells us something) means exhalation, while xī, of course, means inhalation. Hū is pronounced just as it looks: like the English word “who,” and a close approximation to xī is the English word “she.” Chinese words are pronounced in four tones, and the line over “u” in “hū” means the word is pronounced in the first tone, which is called the high level tone. If you hum or sing the word “who,” on a high level note, you will approximate the correct pronunciation of hū. You will also make a strong exhalation, and thus enact what the word means.

We in the West tend to think of breathing in terms of inhalation-exhalation, whereas the opposite is true in the Orient. Dr. Andrew Weil, who calls breathing The Master Key to Self Healing, suggests that we reverse our perception of breathing and think of exhalation as the first part of the cycle.

Here’s a breathing exercise he recommends to all his patients:

Sit erect with good posture and with and hands folded in your lap. Close your eyes and place your tongue in the yogic position: with the tip of the tongue touching the gums just above and behind the upper front teeth.

With lips parted, make a long, slow, deep exhalation through the mouth.

Close the lips and inhale naturally, through the nose, to the (silent) count of four.

Hold the breath to the count of seven.

Exhale through the mouth to the count of eight.

Repeat the cycle.

Concentrate on mastering the 8-4-7 pattern and deepening the breath.

If you exhale completely, forcing more and more air out of your lungs, you will naturally breathe more deeply on the inhalation.

Continue for a few minutes and then increase the time as your practice ripens.

Dr. Weil emphasizes the importance of cultivating healthy breathing habits:

If today you can be aware of breathing more than you were yesterday, you will have taken a measurable step toward enlightenment, will have expanded your consciousness, furthered communication between mind and body, become a little more whole, and so improved your health. In writing about diet and exercise, I point out that those factors, while important, are not the sole determinants of health. I know people who eat excellent diets and exercise faithfully and are not very healthy, and I know some healthy people who eat bad diets and do not exercise. I do not know any healthy people who do not breathe well.  (Natural Health, Natural Medicine, pp. 91-92.)

For other rhythms of breath you may wish to master, one book I would especially recommend is Conscious Breathing by Gay Hendricks.

In Katsuki Sekida’s book, Zen Training, you can learn a powerful rhythm of breath called The Bamboo Method of Breathing.

*       *       *       *

The Deepest Rhythms in Your Body

In 1939 William Sutherland, a practicing Doctor of Osteopathy, announced his discovery that the structures of the central nervous system, like the heart or like the way we breathe, expand and contract in rhythmic motion. He called it “primary respiration” and claimed that the proper functioning of this pulsation was essential to life and health. If the primary respiration got out of kilter, resulting in disease, health could be restored by a process of manipulation and adjustment that came to be known as craniosacral therapy.

This practice flourished for a time but was largely overshadowed by allopathic medicine. With some few exceptions, DOs now follow virtually the same path of medical training and practice as MDs.

Andrew Weil describes how, under the guidance of Dr. Robert Fulford, he began feeling heads to see if he could detect cranial impulses:

At first I felt mainly my own pulse, but as I practiced I began to feel the subtle breathlike motion that Dr. Fulford considers the most vital expression of life. At least I felt it in people who had well-running primary respiratory mechanisms. Once he asked me to feel the head of a woman who, he said, had no detectable cranial impulses. She had been in several bad accidents, one twenty years before, and now suffered extreme fatigue, insomnia, migraine headaches, weak vision, poor digestion, and increased susceptibility to infection. Her head felt like a bag of cement, a dead weight, the rhythm of life not present. After several sessions of treatment, her cranial motions began to return, and as they did, her health began to improve.

Dr. Fulford had so trained his sensitivity of touch that he could feel a human hair under seventeen sheets of paper!

If this is news to you, and you would like to enjoy the thrill of experiencing this primary rhythm for the first time, follow the instructions below by Gay Hendricks:

Lie down on the floor or on a comfortable and firm surface. Stretch your legs out, and rest your arms at your sides. The craniosacral rhythm is subtle; you must be patient with yourself to feel it. Please do not think any less of yourself if it takes a while to get it isolated. At my first training workshop I got agitated because I was one of the last people in the room to “find” it. Save yourself aggravation by granting yourself plenty of space to learn it. It’s a little like learning to ride a bike. One second you can’t, and the next second you can.

Place your fingertips lightly just above your ears. Rest your arms on the floor so they won’t get tired.

Use a very light touch. Imagine you are holding a dime against your head with your fingertips. That’s all the pressure you need for this activity. Just “listen” with your fingertips for a moment. You may be able to feel the pulse of your heartbeat here in your head. As you tune in with your fingertips to your head, notice something else quite interesting. Take a few deep breaths and see if you feel you head expand when you breathe in. In fact, your whole body expands slightly with the in-breath and contracts with the out-breath. This swelling of the body with the in-breath can be measured easily with scientific equipment, although it is not easy to feel with your fingers. Perhaps you can feel it though, if you tune in sensitively with your fingertips.

Now, to the craniosacral rhythm. Take a big breath and hold it for ten or fifteen seconds. While your breath is held, see if you can feel a slow and gentle widening and narrowing of the head. With your breath rhythm out of the way, because your breath is held, you are more likely to be able to feel the rhythm. Each cycle of the craniosacral rhythm takes three or four seconds to swell and three or four seconds to recede. This is the average, although individuals may vary in the speed of their rhythm. Don’t hold your breath to the point of discomfort. Rest a little while between breath-holdings.

Take a minute or two to work with this practice until you can feel the rhythm.

When you have felt the rhythm and can distinguish it from your heartbeat and breath rhythm, take a rest. Stretch your arms down to your sides for a moment. While you are resting, touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Feel with your tongue that the roof of your mouth is shaped like a dome. Place your tongue in the center of the dome. Use a very light pressure with your tongue—as if you were “listening” with it. In a moment you may notice that the dome of the roof of your mouth is in motion! It flattens slightly every three to four seconds, then rounds upward again every three to four seconds. What is causing this movement is our new-found friend, the craniosacral rhythm.

For more on the theme of expansion and contraction, see the next Nachtmusing.

*       *       *       *

Expansion and Contraction

From his long observation of the botanical world, Goethe saw expansion and contraction as an archetypal creative principle at work in the growth of flowering plants. Writer Ernst Lehrs describes it thus:

“Goethe recognized a certain rhythm of expansion and contraction, and he found that the plant passes through it three times during any one cycle of its life. In the foliage the plant expands, in the calyx it contracts; it expands again in the flower and contracts in the pistil and stamens; finally, it expands in the fruit and contracts in the seed.”

Of the many variations on this theme of expansion and contraction, the rise and fall of barometric pressure can, as a metaphor, be seen as the “breathing” of our planet.

It can also be seen in the segmented stems of bamboo where, after every few inches of smooth stem there is a knot or node, with this pattern recurring up the stem. The smooth stems are hollow, giving flexibility to the plant, but the nodes are hard and solid, giving strength. The plant thus embodies two complementary principles.

A variation of this rhythm that involves the entire universe, with one cycle taking billions of years to run its course, is the expansion of the Big Bang and then, if what scientists tell us is correct, the contraction of the Big Crunch.

*       *       *       *

Einstein’s E
finds refreshment
in the
e of Euler,
nicht wahr?

*       *       *       *

Dogenisms

Some of Dogen’s sayings are so uniquely sui generis that they have come to be called Dogenisms. And so four gnomic, or should I say gnomonic, Dogenisms that will repay reflection:

Time is already none other than beings, and beings are all none other than time.

時すでにこれ有なり、有はみな時なり。

“The nothingness (mu) of all the various nothings (shomu) must be learned in the nothingness of no-Buddha-nature (mu-bussho).”

シカアレハ諸無ノ無ハ。無佛性ノ無ニ學スヘシ。

A full being-time half known is a half being-time fully known.

たとひ半究盡の有時も、半有時の究盡なり。

The arousing of aspiration [in different] minds at the selfsame time is the arousing [at different] times of the selfsame mind.

コノユヘニ同時發心アリ、同心發時アリ。

Eihei Dogen (永平道元) was the thirteenth-century Zen master who founded the Japanese Soto school of Zen Buddhism.

Also known as Dogen Zenji (道元禅師) and Dogen Kigen (道元希玄).

*       *       *       *

Chiasmus

Some of you will have noticed that each of the sayings in the foregoing section is an example of chiasmus, a rhetorical figure wherein the writer reverses the terms of the two clauses that make up the sentence. President John Kennedy made good use of this figure in a famous speech when he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Look again at the last Dogenism above. Here are the four key terms in the two clauses of Dogen’s sentence:

同時發心 . . . 同心發時

Notice how, in the second clause, he “crosses,” or reverses, the order of the characters for time (時) and mind (心).

Dogen was very fond of this rhetorical figure and it enjoys pervasive expression in his writings. Some of Dogen’s ideas are congenial to the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and I find it of interest that Whitehead too made ample use of chiasmus in his philosophical works. 

If Dogen and Whitehead found it necessary to use the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, over and over again, to express some of their insights—this made me stop and wonder whether the form of chiasmus might be related to some crosswise forms found in the structure of reality. A browse of the Internet then revealed that chiasm is the name of an X-shaped structure in the hypothalamus  where the optic nerves intersect or “cross” . . . and, in the science of genetics, there is a crossing-over process, also called chiasm, in the division of cells called meiosis.

Furthermore, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty uses chiasm as a technical term to refer to a reversibility whereby we humans, by means of our bodies, our flesh, can both see and be seen, listen and be heard, touch and be touched.

Dogen says sayonara with yet another chiasmus:

The impermanence of Buddha-nature;
the Buddha-nature of impermanence.

無堂佛性

佛性無堂

 *       *       *       *

Particulars Tomorrow

The play on opening night had been badly done, and David St. Ville knew it. But write the review, he must. The cast would be waiting there, laughing and drinking cocktails, to read it. But how to write the review without offending Vanessa?—that was, indeed, the question.

Vanessa’s performance had been conspicuously ordinary. There was no other word for it. For one thing, she was miscast, and she was too old to play Hypatia. Anyone, including the most countrified groundling, could see that. Hugh’s strong characterization of John Tarleton had been the one thing that saved the play from bathos. Even Lena—and this was unusual—wasn’t quite up to the knocker.

David St. Ville had sent Vanessa a telegram for opening night, wishing her well with the usual extravagant clichés, but he had foreseen already, from the dress rehearsal, that the telegram would be a lie. The play would close soon, he knew. It would have a short run. But, if he wished to maintain his relationship with Vanessa, he knew he had to commit at least the sin of omission. He would have to face her later that night in her apartment. So, write a brief, ambiguous review. Yes. Ambiguity: that was the knack. Yet, not so flagrant that it would compromise him with his peers or his more astute readers, whose numbers were hardly legion..

Smiling, his arms folded behind him, David St. Ville ambled slowly round his study, and gazed with pleasure at the imitation boiserie, the single Watteau, the books, the tapestries. The light in the study was soft, subdued, and comfortable.

He sat down at his computer and withdrew from the pocket of his smoking jacket his favorite meerschaum. He filled the bowl slowly with Latakia, tamped it down, and lit it. Languorously he inhaled the soft and aromatic smoke. Maybe just a bit of Drambuie to aid the contemplative mood? Yes, why not. Smiling, David St. Ville poured the dark liqueur into a miniature glass, elevated the glass to his lips and urbanely sipped. He stroked the soft cambric of his cravat, and, with his elegantly slim fingers poised over the keyboard, began to type:

Overall, the play just missed passing muster. Some of the players, although giving adequate performances, did not seem to quite fit their roles. However, two of the characterizations were enormously strong, and the comprised the redemptive aspect of the play. But, because of time and (yes) the deadline, I must be brief. Particulars tomorrow.

David St. Ville smiled as he re-read what he had written. Yes, it would in all probability work. The aesthetics of delay: that was always the key.

It was two o’clock in the morning when David St. Ville used his key to enter Vanessa’s apartment. Sensing at once the warm female opulence he so liked, he closed his eyes and breathed it in with a smile. Vanessa was sitting on the divan, and he went and sat down next to her. She was wearing a soft blue peignoir. He leaned toward her, kissed her, and she responded to his kiss.

Easing slightly away from her, he said:

“You must be quite tired.”

“Yes, it’s been a long night.”

“Why not go to bed. We can talk there.”

“Why not, indeed,” she said.

Smiling, they walked into the bedroom and, after she had turned off the lights, went to the bed. David St. Ville, smiling more as he smelled the familiar opulence of the darkened room, sat down on the edge of the bed and began leisurely undressing. Once undressed, he lay down and turned to her and they again kissed ardently. David St. Ville touched with slim sure fingers her hair, her face, her neck, her bare shoulders. Smiling, he reached down and farther down. Suddenly, Vanessa pushed his hand roughly away.

“What do you mean by doing that?” he asked, surprised.

Vanessa kissed him lightly on the cheek, and then whispered:

“Particulars tomorrow, darling.”

[ Note: two things may be of interest— (1) The play referred to in this “short short” that I wrote a long time ago is G. B. Shaw’s comic masterpiece—Misalliance. (2) I enjoyed the great pleasure of playing the role of Joey Percival in a production of the play performed by the Community Theater of the city where I resided at the time. ]

*       *       *       *

Levity

By “levity” I mean both “lightness in mood, behavior, or word” and “lightness in weight” as the action of a counter-force that is the “opposite of gravity.”

In Scotland, at Glasgow University, there’s a scientific experiment still up and running that was begun over a century ago by William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin. Imagine a large glass jar filled with water and, situated at the mid-point in the water, a thick slice of wax, equally dividing the upper and lowers regions of the jar. Small corks have been place underneath the wax and metal bullets above. Over the course of a year, the bullets will have sunk down through the wax to drop to the bottom of the jar, while the corks, buoyant with levity, will have migrated up through the wax to rise and float on the water’s surface. Does this not beautifully illustrate the contrasts of gravity and levity?

Peter Matthiessen describes his buoyant experience of levity:

In a dream I am walking joyfully up the mountain. Something breaks and falls away, and all is light. Nothing has changed, yet all is amazing, luminescent, free. Released at last, I rise into the sky. . . . This dream comes often. Sometimes I run, then lift up like a kite, high above earth, and always I sail transcendent for a time before awaking. I choose to awake, for fear of falling, yet such dreams tell me that I am a part of things, if only I would let go, and keep on going. “Do not be heavy,” Soen Roshi says. “Be light, light, light—full of light!”

— Peter Matthiesssen, The Snow Leopard, p. 176.

That Daoist master Lieh-tzu was well-versed in levity is clear from the following quotation:

At the end of nine years my mind gave free rein to its reflections, my mouth free passage to its speech. Internal and External were blended into Unity. After that, there was no distinction between eye and ear, ear and nose, nose and mouth: my mind was frozen, my body in dissolution, my flesh and bones all melted together. I was wholly unconscious of what my body was resting on, or what was under my feet. I was borne this way and that on the wind, like dry chaff or leaves falling from a tree. In fact, I knew not whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind.

九年之後，橫心之所念，橫口妝狳央．內外進矣．而後眼如耳，耳如鼻，鼻如口，無不同也．心凝形釋，骨肉都融；不覺形之所倚，足之所履，隨風東西，猶木葉幹殼．竟不知風乘我腹，我乘風乎．

From the Book of Lieh-Tzu, translation by Lionel Giles.

列子

Lieh-Tzü (Wade-Giles)
Liezi (Pinyin)

Liezi, whose full name was Lie Yukou, means Master Lie and refers both to the man and his book, the Leize.

This passage calls to mind another Daoist master, Chuang-tzu (莊子) and his dream of fluttering around as a butterfly only to awake wondering whether the dream was his or the butterfly’s. 

Chuang-tzu was well aware of Lieh-tzu’s avian abilities:

Lieh Tzu could ride the wind (御風) and go soaring around with cool and breezy skill, but after fifteen days he came back to earth. As far as the search for good fortune went, he didn’t fret and worry. He escaped the trouble of walking, but he still had to depend on something to get around.

Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, p. 32.

I will let JJ have the last word on this:

Nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 505.17.

御風

*       *       *       *

Ludibundity

I’ll coin a word—ludibundity, meaning the state, or the process, of  being full of play. When levity and ludibundity co-arise, we are all lost in the funhouse. Absinthe-minded. On the path of playful samadhi.

Katsuki Sekida provides a good description of “playful samadhi” (戲三昧) in his book, Two Zen Classics, p. 30:

“Merry and playful samadhi. A merry and egoless activity of mind, such as that of an actor who, playing a part on stage, is freed from his own ego-centered thinking. In just this way, when a student of Zen fully realizes that there is no constant ego to which he can attach his notions of self and identity, the constrictions of egotistically motivated behavior and thinking are broken. Activity in this free frame of mind is called playful samadhi.”

In was in the spirit of ludibundity that I conceived and wrote the following antic “Ode”:

　　eaudeau-dela

　The man with catarrh
　Who strums a guitar
　Sneezes, and evens
　The score with Stevens.

　Abiding in stone—a
　Girl—one of your Mona
　Lisas, that old floozy
　Who embraced Brancusi.

　A chap with no salary
　Now framed in the gallery
　Wheezes: gutturals basso
　Profundo chez Picasso.

　The blind mole . . . —featly quilled ere a
　Player fluffed that line of Peri-
　Cles’s—undermines the fresco
　Engineered by Ionesco.

　Hearken, yes—but don’t get mellow. De-
　Mur when the too tuneful melody
　Teases—unless as sagely batty
　As . . . nightingales of Erik Satie.

Since there is an entry for “ludibund” in the Oxford English Dictionary, but not for “ludibundity,” my coinage can really lay claim only to the “-ity.” In light of this, my claim to coinage reminds me of my favorite line from the movie, Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson (in his role as Jake Gittes) says, “Well, to tell you the truth, I lied a little.”

*       *       *       *

Meta-Fours
à la David Spooner

My fascination with the number four began with the study of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s great novel wherein four plays a central role both structurally and thematically. Joyce would have been quick to notice a sexual innuendo in the previous sentence and, indeed, my continuing meditations on the numerous epiphanies of the number four may be thought of as foreplay . . . or four-play!

Therefore, I was delighted to learn that the Scottish scholar David Spooner has made a brilliant exploration of this, and a fourfold theme weaves a meandering path throughout his four books. In an analogy to the many constants in science, such as Planck’s constant, he calls this the Fourfold Constant and his many examples show that it has cosmic scope.

 In one of his many insightful “patterns that connect,” he compares the movements of a symphony to the life cycle of a butterfly:

“In the first movement, themes are stated (the egg, or by some recent interpretations the proto-larva); the second movement proceeds slowly like a caterpillar; the third such as the scherzo of the Eroica tends to be febrile and anticipatory like a shimmering chrysalis trembling with incipient finality; while the fourth usually represents a summation, which as Berlioz analyzed in relation to Beethoven’s composition, leads from tension to release, from compulsion to liberation, from the tragic to the joyous . . . As listeners or performers, we travel through these stages as the musical form unfolds. . . . [T]he four-movement symphony had already become dominant even by 1780, although three-movement ones continued to be composed. In other words, the very fabric of the great period of classical achievement is both an anthem to quaternity, and a reverberation of the insect connection. . . . The great works of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and those who followed them, are metaphysical to our consciousness, yet have a very real basis in the natural world.”

For those who have ears to hear, the experience of listening to a symphony is thus “a passing through four major stages of intellectual and spiritual life corresponding to the four stages undergone by those insects that undergo complete metamorphosis. In other words, the key works of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Brahms, suggest an especially exact resemblance between music and our sense of time passing, of growth.”

Now, as an expression of penetrating insight, that’s a hard act to follow, but Spooner takes flight again with this analysis of Shakespeare:

“Shakespeare tends to write in segments of 4 plays. So the peak of his early work is the two historical tetralogies. Later there are the 4 great Tragedies where his heroes and heroines meet their fate in 5-Act worlds. These are interwoven with 4 Problem Plays followed by the 4 Last Plays. Keats’s much quoted perception of Shakespeare’s biographic parabola can be seen anew in the light of these paradigms: ‘A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures figurative-which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure—but he is not figurative—Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.’

“Working from this analogical method, the following reveals itself:

1. The Egg (the History Tetralogies—3 Parts of Henry VI, Richard III, and then Richard II, 2 Parts of Henry IV, and Henry V)

2. The Larva (The Problem Plays—Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure)

3. The Pupa (The Tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear)

4. The Imago (The Last Plays—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest)

“In Shakespeare, the creative process can be seen as a fourfold helix associated with the parallel processes of metamorphic evolution.”

Spooner traces variations of this fourfold theme as it flowers in the works of novelists Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce; poets William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas; twentieth-century Spanish literature; and the author of Walden, Henry David Thoreau.

I can’t resist mentioning that Spooner finds significance in Eliot’s last great work: Four Quartets, with four figuring not once, but twice in the title! For those unfamiliar with this work by Eliot, Four Quartets is a long poem divided into four parts, or four poems, each with its own title: Burnt Norton, East Coker, Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. A basic symbolism that resonates within the poem are the four elements. Although all four elements are present in each of the quartets, each quartet gives primary expression, or emphasis, to a single element, as follows:

Burnt Norton—air
East Coker—earth (dust)
Dry Salvages—water
Little Gidding—fire

One more example of the fourfold theme:

The first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Spooner observes, “The overall structure of the symphony follows the general pattern of the fourfold quartet movement, the slower third movement running into the finale without a break. The first four notes of the piece are therefore an urgent microcosm of the whole symphony, not only the thematic basis of much of it, but a stamping out or imprinting of the total mathematical impact. In Beethoven’s words, they are destiny knocking at the door.”

*       *       *       *

　　　　　　Sea Change

　When one sweetheart bloodied myself in stains
　And her sexton minister drained my bells
　The mister of my graver bones
　Shoved his ghost into the limping walls
　And with my sailing man of nowhere
　I crossed the channels of your spheres.

　Cadaver’s belt on the animal skies
　I was all zodiac of the vaulted groin
　And in ram and roe-infested seas
　I navigated your bubbly main
　Made Jonah’s shape in my pickled beds
　And fished one belly for the dead.

　A sea goat shone with the mounting starseed
　And my hooking pretender with a dark fish
　Had time as his shift and heaven’s net his shroud
　Age locked his skeleton saint in the flesh
　And all figures of the sunless country
　Chalked midnight on the cancer bay.

　No journey through the rotating seawheel
　For time’s character of the sawbone sex
　Or the insect of my galactic scrawl
　Measuring the fats of the mummy box
　Only dolphin’s noise from the dropping west
　And the druid misters of my ghost.

　Through rivers where the major symbols run
　He sees the spindrift shades of dolphins going
　And his cross of genesis in the planted sun
　(Himself the seabud of the grave sowing)
　And climbing past time and the tiding shore:
　Sand, evanescing footprints, and nothing more.

*       *       *       *

Tat Tvam Asi

To experience ultimate reality, the school of Indian thought known as Advaita Vedanta recommends that one repeatedly ask the question: Who am I? But the question itself begs the question—it assumes that there is an “I am” about whom such an inquiry can be made. Notwithstanding, Advaita claims that such an inquiry, if followed to the end, culminates in an experience of ultimate reality with the revelation:

　Tat tvam asi

　That thou art

But, as Ajahn Brahamvamso astutely points out:

But such an end-doctrine is plainly begging the question. What is this “That” that you are? The Buddha never circled around the issue in such a fruitless way. For the Buddha would say: “Pratitya Samutpada tvam asi—You are Dependent Origination.” Pratitya samutpada is at the very heart of the Dharma.

Among its many negations, if there is one claim about which Buddhism is insistent, it is that there is no self: the doctrine of annata. If this is indeed given, some might conclude that nihilism follows ineluctably. However, between abiding self, or enduring substance, and nothingness, between substantialism and nihilism, there is what Siddhartha called the Middle Way, and this follows from two complementary observations:

　It cannot be said that there is something . . . because cessation is seen.

　It cannot be said that there is nothing . . . because arising is seen.

What is this Middle Way? Pratitya samutpada.

When seen in the clear light of dependent arising and ceasing, all species of a substantial, enduring self are seen, as Brahamvamso puts it, as “transient, insubstantial, granular, and fading away soon after they arise. They are all conditioned. They exist only as long as they are supported by their external causes, which are themselves unstable.”

And, according to Old Yellow Face, as the Buddha is sometimes affectionately called in Zen writings, to “enter the stream” leading to enlightenment requires an understanding of Dependent Origination.

*       *       *       *

Pratitya Samutpada

What the Buddha realized, as he sat under the Bodhi tree, was so revolutionary that he had to coin new words—a new technical vocabulary—to express his insights. The key term was pratitya samutpada, variously translated as dependent origination, dependent co-arising, conditioned genesis, conditioned co-production, interdependent arising, and mutual interdependence.

Whereas the French philosopher Descartes, with his substance-biased view of reality, held that an individual thing “requires nothing but itself in order to exist,” Siddhartha would reply, first, that there is no such thing as substance, or a thing, and, second, that the momentary events that do exist—they arise, and almost as quickly cease, within an extensive web of mutual relationships. Therefore, since events both arise and cease, the idea of dependent origination requires, for its balanced expression, the complementary idea of dependent cessation.

The importance of this concept is clearly expressed in the following quote:

Dependent arising (pratitya samutpada) is the central principle of the Buddha’s teaching, constituting both the objective content of its liberating insight and the germinative source for its vast network of doctrines and disciplines. As the frame behind the four noble truths, the key to the perspective of the middle way, and the conduit to the realization of selflessness, it is the unifying theme running through the teaching’s multifarious expressions, binding them together as diversified formulations of a single coherent vision. The earliest sutras equate dependent arising with the unique discovery of the Buddha’s enlightenment, so profound and difficult to grasp that he at first hesitated to announce it to the world. A simple exposition of the principle sparks off the liberating wisdom in the minds of his foremost disciples, while skill in explaining its workings is made a qualification of an adroit expounder of the Dharma. So crucial is this principle to the body of the Buddha’s doctrine that an insight into dependent arising is held to be sufficient to yield an understanding of the entire teaching. In the words of the Buddha: “He who sees dependent arising sees the Dharma; he who sees the Dharma sees dependent arising.”

Another term, closely related but with a different emphasis, is idappaccayata, which adds to mutuality the perspective of conditionality. The two ideas are, as it were, two sides of the same coin.

Idappaccayata is pronounced: Ee-dah-pah-chah-YAH-tah.

The Chinese characters that translate these two terms

　緣起 = pratitya samutpada

and

　此緣性 = idappaccayata

share a common character 緣 (yuán), relating to causation, that is the common thread linking the two together, with the characters thus presenting pictures worth a thousand words as they show similarity shining forth from difference. A Zen saying leaps to mind: Though not identical, they are not different; though not different, they are not one; though not one, they are not many.

And so we have, thus far, pratitya samutpada, dependent origination and cessation, and idappaccayata, the principle of conditionality, or, as it is also sometimes called, this-that conditionality.

The basic idea underlying all this is expressed in a simple fourfold formula:

　1. When this is, that is;
　2. From the arising of this comes the arising of that;
　3. When this isn't, that isn't;
　4. From the ceasing of this comes the ceasing of that.

Or, more succinctly:

　When this is, that is;
　This arising, that arises;
　When this is not, that is not;
　This ceasing, that ceases.

The original Pali reads:

　Imasmim sati, idam hoti;
　imass uppada, idam uppajjati;
　imasmim asati, idam na hoti;
　imassa nirodha, idam nirujjhati.

And in Chinese:

　此有故彼有、

　此生故彼生、

　此無故彼無、

　此滅故彼滅。

Note the elegant pattern of formulation, and reiteration, in each language, perhaps most apparent in the beauty and symmetry of the Chinese characters.

And so, to repeat:

　When this is, that is;
　This arising, that arises;
　When this is not, that is not;
　This ceasing, that ceases.

One analysis I found online observes that causality, understood in this way, is not linear but results from the interweaving of two modes of causation: diachronic and synchronic, with diachronic naming the causal influence of the past, and synchronic, the causation in the present moment.

If causation was strictly diachronic, or linear, the world would be totally deterministic whereas randomness would prevail if synchronic causation was the only mode. Together, dancing in measure, they make possible a coherent and self-surpassing pattern and the production of novelty.

Quoting from the online article:

“The diachronic principle — taking (2) and (4) as a pair — connects events over time; the synchronic principle — (1) and (3) — connects objects and events in the present moment. The two principles intersect, so that any given event is influenced by two sets of conditions: input from the past and input from the present.”

And indeed, to enjoy a play on words, this is a difference that really makes a difference, for it frees us from what would otherwise be the inexorable circular turnings of the wheel of karma. We are then free to, like the galaxies, spiral upward and outward in expansive growth and creativity.

The long quote, in blue font, is from Bhikkhu Bodhi, Transcendental Dependent Arising: A Translation and Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta, pp. 6-7.

To access the online article from which I quote—

Go to: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/glossary.html

Go to the word

idappaccayata

in the Glossary and click on MORE, a link that will take you to the article.

*       *       *       *

Yes, That Mr. Spock

Spock shook his head. “I am not a believer in numerology, astrology, phrenology, and other pseudo-sciences and superstitions.”

“Then what do you believe in?”

“Logic.”

*       *       *       * 

Process Koan

Whitehead invites us to wonder about this question:

　　Does the thinker create the thought,
　　or the thought, the thinker?

Whitehead’s answer can be found in his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in section 3 of chapter 6, pp. 147-51 (Corrected Edition).

*       *       *       *

Gnostalgia

If,
as Plato held,
true knowledge is a remembering,
or a recollection,
why not call it

gnostalgia

In Plato’s Greek, the word for “recollection” is anamnesis, which derives from the Indo-European root men-, meaning “to think,” with derivatives referring to various qualities and states of mind and thought. Some derivatives:

mind, mental, mention, automatic, memento, comment, reminiscent, mania, mandarin, mint, money, monitor, monster, monument, muster, admonish, demonstrate, premonition, summon, mosaic, Muse, museum, music, amnesia, amnesty.*

A related word is aletheia, meaning “truth,” with its two parts, a- and -letheia, meaning an un-forgetting.

And, last but not Lethe:

In Greek mythology, there is the river of forgetfulness that runs through Hades.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says:

For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;—this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God—when regardless of that which we now

call being she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.

Translation by Benjamin Jowett

W. C. Humbold’s translation:

For to be a man one must understand the content of a general term, leaving the field of manifold sense-perceptions, and entering that in which the object of knowledge is unique and grasped only by reasoning. This process is a remembering of what our soul once saw as it made its journey with a god, looking down upon what we now assert to be real and gazing upwards at what is Reality itself. This is clearly the reason why it is right for only the philosopher’s mind to have wings; for he remains always, so far as he can, through memory in the field of precisely those entities in whose presence, as though he were a god, he is himself divine. And if a man makes a right use of such entities as memoranda, always being perfectly initiated into perfect mysteries, he alone becomes truly perfected. He separates himself from the busy interests of men and approaches the divine. He is rebuked by the vulgar as insane, for they cannot know that he is possessed by divinity.

* The American Heritage Dictionary

*       *       *       *

Heraclitus and Parmenides

If Heraclitus is the early champion of change, the partisan of permanence is another early Greek philosopher, Parmenides, who asserted that there is no change, period.

His position contra change can be stated as follows: Being is and Being is One; change and plurality are both illusions. If anything becomes, it either comes to be out of being or non-being. But if out of being, then it already is; there is no real coming to be. And from non-being, or nothing, only nothing can come. Becoming, therefore, is an illusion.

Now, since becoming, or change, is clearly apparent in the everyday world of ordinary sense perception, Parmenides is not talking about appearances but about a truth known to reason which can see beyond appearances. This is a first approximation of a distinction that Plato would later make, with more generality, between knowledge and opinion, thought and sense. It is an important distinction, philosophically, since it forms the basis of all varieties of idealism.

Because of this distinction and his assertion that Being is unchanging, uncreated, and complete just as it is, Parmenides has been called the father of idealism. Indeed, these are central tenets of idealism but, as Frederick Copleston* convincingly argues, Parmenides used them to establish not idealism but a monistic materialism.

Although the One of Parmenides can be grasped only in thought, there is, as Copleston points out, a big difference between “being grasped in thought” and “being thought.”

* Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: Greece & Rome (Vol. 1). His discussion of Parmenides is on pages 64-70.

*       *       *       *

The Consolations of Philosophy

Philosophy does offer some consolation, but when I wonder about what leads thinkers to adopt, and fervently hold and defend, different philosophical positions—I sometimes get a sinking feeling like I’m skating on metaphysical thin ice.

I’ve been ruminating on an idea for a paper that explores this question: How or why is it that people, even very smart people, even people of genius, can come to hold radically contrasting worldviews? Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, two pivotal intellectual figures of the 20th century whose fundamental views were as different and night and day, present an illustrative case.

In their younger days, Whitehead and Russell collaborated for ten years on Principia Mathematica. But when Russell began the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1940,

Whitehead, who did the formal introduction, made this revealing remark: “Bertie thinks I am muddleheaded; but then I think he is simpleminded.”

Ken Wilber offers a sort of solution by saying the various claims are true, but partial, and he may be partly right about this but it still seems to me that something is missing.

Someone once said much the same by developing a metaphor, Glimpses of Fuji, with the idea that the more glimpses we have, the better we can comprehend the whole mountain. Then there’s the elephant metaphor in Eastern (Hindu?) thought.

A sustained time when I greatly enjoyed the adventures of ideas was the year or more I spent reading all the books, some twenty or so, by Charles Hartshorne. This was a time of clarity for me and I still find that CH is one of philosophy’s most lucid thinkers. He’s also a very good writer.

In homage to Hartshorne I christened what I call The pH Factor, with pH standing for “post-Hartshorne”—signifying how a reading of Hartshorne’s work leaves one with increased acumen and perspicuity. Two professional philosophers with whom I was in communication at the time agreed and, at my invitation, each of them wrote a response as follows:

From Donald Wayne Viney, professor of philosophy at Pittsburg State University:

The pH factor—I like that. I know first-hand what you are talking about when you use that expression. I credit the man’s writings with helping me pass my doctoral exams. Prior to reading Hartshorne, the history of philosophy was a confusing mass of theories parading one after another in the classes I took. After Hartshorne’s influence, the history of philosophy began to make some sense to me.

I resonate to what you say about spotting obvious errors that, before reading Hartshorne, would not have been obvious. I recall a conversation with a bunch of philosophers sympathetic to the views of Alvin Plantinga (non-Hartshorneans all) in a cafeteria in Bellingham, Washington, in 1986. We were discussing “possible worlds” and I was trying to convince the group that there is something fundamentally wrongheaded about the way Plantinga approaches the topic. “According to Plantinga,” I said, “the actual world is simply one of the possible worlds, but that jeopardizes or destroys the distinction between the possible and the actual.” Apparently, they’d never thought of that. One of them said, “You know, he’s right about Plantinga.” I don’t recall convincing them that Plantinga was wrong about possibility, but at least the exposure to Hartshorne allowed me to see something that they did not, or at least to see it in a different way.

From Randall E. Auxier, associate professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University:

I must confess that I used to excuse myself from reading Hartshorne by imagining he was just Whitehead’s hit man, and since I liked Whitehead, I wouldn’t stand in need of Hartshorne’s valuable services. Then I read The Divine Relativity and began to realize that here was an independent thinker who, while resonating with Whitehead, brings a very different message. 

Hartshorne is more rigorous in pursuing a point, and far more tenacious in turning an idea over and over until he has seen all its implications. I do not think that anything short of Hartshorne’s remarkable thoroughness could have led me to loosen the bonds of childhood affection for the (incoherent) classical conception of God I carried around. And I was wasting my time trying to make sense of something that can simply be shown not to make sense. Now I am free to employ my energy more constructively in thinking about how to conceive of and serve the concrete God that is, not the concept of God I inherited.

A quote from Hartshorne to make you stop and wonder:

It is arguable that, had Einstein known a metaphysics more favorable to quantum physics than the Spinozism and other similar doctrines influencing him, he might not have spent the latter decades of his life vainly attempting to recover the absolute “incarnate reason” of classical causality which had been made irrelevant by twentieth-century discoveries, including his own.

The quotation is from Hartshorne’s essay, “Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature,” in the book, Mind in Nature, edited by John Cobb and David Griffin, p. 94

*       *       *       *

　　　　Trivia

　Lithe winds lull in the linden,
　Night drowses into dawn,
　Dishabille on her pillow,
　Closed eyes to look upon.

　Lithe winds lull to loll allay,
　Sunrose the day along,
　Lithe winds lull a roving bird,
　A lull alluring song.

　　　　Peremptory perch,
　Lollopping round a shallow stone,
　A toss kerplunks a rainbow lurch,
　The surface rings alone.

　　　　Perfunctory love
　Abates cathexis on the grass,
　Nor bobbing with the cork above
　His twilit lookingglass.

　　　　Bedtime
　And the whippoorwill’s refrain
　　　Numbers knell
　　On the windowpane.

*       *       *       *

The Order of Actualization

Process thought holds that there is divine Input, continuous but variable divine influence, in every new moment for all the natural unities throughout the universe. Such influence (Whitehead calls them “initial aims”) is variable because each individual is unique and the aim must take into account the gestalt of each unique perspective and so tailor it that there is some measure of harmony in the creative advance of all the countless entities. If this is the case, the complexity of what God accomplishes moment by moment is beyond astonishing!

This makes possible possibility—but not unlimited possibility. There is what may be called the order of actualization.

Chimpanzees cannot evolve directly from cockroaches, or Einstein could not have suddenly showed up among the ancient Sumerians. The technology of the aerospace industry presupposes many other more basic technologies that must precede the advent of airplanes or space shuttles. Far from our possibilities being unlimited or infinite, we humans are constrained within the limits of this order of actualization. What even God can accomplish in any new moment is largely, but not completely, determined by what has been accomplished in preceding moments. This does not mean that great, wonderful, and even astonishing things cannot happen; what it does mean is that a certain level of continuity seems to be the general rule. Process thought does allow for what are called “saltations” (or “big jumps”) in evolutionary theory, in the history of ideas, in personal transformation, and in healing. But analysis will reveal an underlying continuity even here so as to avoid any suggestion of “supernatural” events.

Also, in creative breakthroughs, a fortuitous symbolism sometimes seems to point the way:

It was an image of the uroborus, the snake swallowing its own tail, presented to him while he was in a light doze, that gave Friedrich Kekulé the key to the hitherto elusive structure of the benzene molecule. Archimedes has his famous “Eureka” experience while soaking in a tub of hot water. The insight that enabled Elias Howe to invent the sewing machine came in a nightmare when he was chased by cannibals wielding spears with a hole in the tip. It was not while racking his brain in the lab, but as he was walking down a spiral staircase at Oxford that James Watson intuitively glimpsed the spiral shape of DNA. Democritus first conceived the atomic structure of reality upon smelling the aroma of freshly baked bread.

In light of his considerable research into creativity, Csikszentmihalyi gives a lot of credit to sheer luck, and although some people make the claim that “there are no accidents,” I sometimes feel the distinct presence of a Joker in nature’s deck of cards.

Here’s a quote from Alfie:

There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. Secondly, there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase. Thirdly, there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases. In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351-52

*       *       *       *

Goethe
as Process Thinker

Morphology, the science of organic form, was founded and named by the great German writer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In “The Purpose Set Forth,” a short essay about this new science, he makes a distinction between two ways of conceiving the living forms of nature. The following quotation from the essay will show that Goethe articulates a “process” view of nature that clearly anticipates some elements in the thought of Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of process philosophy:

Thus the history of art, knowledge, and science has produced many attempts to establish and develop a theory which we will call “morphology.” The historical part of our discourse will deal with the different forms in which these attempts have appeared.

The Germans have a word for the complex of existence presented by a physical organism: Gestalt [structured form]. With this expression they exclude what is changeable and assume that an interrelated whole is identified, defined, and fixed in character.

But if we look at all these Gestalten, especially the organic ones, we will discover that nothing in them is permanent, nothing is at rest or defined—everything is in a flux of continual motion. This is why German frequently and fittingly makes use of the word Bildung [formation] to describe the end product and what is in process of production as well.

Thus in setting forth a morphology we should not speak of Gestalt, or if we use the term we should at least do so only in reference to the idea, the concept, or to an empirical element held fast for a mere moment of time.

When something has acquired a form it metamorphoses immediately to a new one. If we wish to arrive at some living perception of nature we ourselves must remain as quick and flexible as nature and follow the example she gives.

In anatomy, when we dissect a body into its parts, and further separate these parts into their parts, we will at last arrive at elementary constituents called “similar parts.” These will not concern us here. Instead we will concentrate on a higher principle of the organism, a principle we will characterize as follows.

No living thing is unitary in nature; every such thing is a plurality. Even the organism which appears to us as individual exists as a collection of independent living entities. Although alike in idea and predisposition, these entities, as they materialize, grow to become alike or similar, unalike or dissimilar. In part these entities are joined from the outset, in part they find their way together to form a union. They diverge and then seek each other again; everywhere and in every way they thus work to produce a chain of creation without end. [translation: Douglas Miller]

Like Whitehead, who called his thought the philosophy of organism, Goethe’s focus was on the organic processes of nature and his work has been characterized by one writer as a “new organics.” So impressed was Rudolf Steiner, who was called upon to oversee and edit the publication of a new edition of Goethe’s scientific writings, that he hailed Goethe as “the Galileo of the organic sciences.”

Goethe saw the natural world not as a finished product, but as an always or ever creating nature (einer immer schaffenden Natur). The essence or true nature of all natural entities can be apprehended, not by scrutiny of static forms, but only by bringing attention to the coming-to-be or the becoming of the entity. Instead of asking, What is it?—the crucial question for Goethe was, How does it become?

This is not to exclude permanence, or something that abides, for Goethe saw an essential polarity dynamically present throughout the universe (as did Whitehead), with one polar term serving as a necessary complement to the other. Thus, in making a distinction between reason and understanding, two modes of conceiving the world, he writes:

“Reason is directed to things in the course of becoming; understanding, to things that have become. (Die Vernunft ist auf das Werdende, der Verstand auf das Gewordene angewiesen.)

Again, like Whitehead, and unlike scientific materialism, Goethe found reason to seek explanations of phenomena in terms of a top-down approach rather than starting at the bottom. The highest expressions of nature may suggest what is also present, if only nascently, in the lowest forms. Speaking of this aspect of Goethe, Ernst Lehrs says, “He was in actual fact deeply interested in the lower plants, but . . . to understand the plant [in general] he found himself obliged to pay special attention to examples in which it came to its most perfect expression. For what was hidden in the alga was made manifest in the rose. To demand of Goethe that in accordance with ordinary science he should have explained nature ‘from below upwards’ is to misunderstand the methodological basis of all his investigations.”

Yet another of Goethe’s ideas, Steigerung, meaning, as discussed above, a heightening, intensification, or enhancement of experience—this, too, resonates with Whitehead’s thought. One of Whitehead’s deepest convictions was that value pervades the natural world and that the thrust of the evolutionary process is toward creatures who can enjoy ever higher harmonies and intensities of feeling.

To use a musical analogy, the heightening, or Steigerung, seen in the series from cicada to songbird to Mozart reveals a rising scale of such aesthetic enjoyments. “The teleology of the Universe,” says Whitehead, “is directed to the production of Beauty.” And, to give a concrete example, Goethe would say that the teleology of a plant is directed to the blossoming of a flower. For what is the flower but a masterpiece of Steigerung, as actualized by the plant itself.

Goethe’s extensive studies and experiments in chromatics, the science of color, taught him also to be alert to the becoming, or coming-into-being, of colors in nature.

Again, as a variation on the above theme, for Goethe, the question is not: What is color, but: How does color arise? How does color come to be?

For example, if you go outside early one morning, before daylight, and gaze up at the sky, you will see all the stars against a background of darkness. But as you continue to gaze, when dawn breaks and the day begins to lighten, you will then see the coming-into-being of the color blue as it suffuses the sky overhead. The color blue, as seen in the sky, is never a finished product, but is always in a process of becoming, of coming into presence.

As physicist Arthur G. Zajonc points out, Goethe agrees with Whitehead regarding the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness:

The mistaken ascription of reality to primary qualities and to the hypothetical schemes of the seventeenth century Whitehead calls the error of ‘misplaced concreteness.’ As a result of the ensuing confusion, he declares, “modern philosophy has been ruined” (SMW, 55).

Goethe fully shares Whitehead’s concern regarding the error of misplaced concreteness. He writes in his Theory of Colors: “The investigator of nature should take heed not to reduce observation to mere notion, to substitute words for this notion, and to use and deal with these words as if they were things. . . . Yet how difficult it is not to put the sign in the place of the thing; how difficult to keep the being [Wesen] always livingly before one and not to slay it with the word.”

The full sensual experience of nature which Goethe embraces can only suffer at the hands of an abstractive science. Nor will Goethe rest satisfied with a purely “descriptive” or “instrumentalist” rendering of natural phenomena. His is a search for the True, an attempt to catch nature showing an Idea in a pure archetypal phenomenon. Goethe’s critique of hypothetical entities may sound like Mach or Duhem, but we must not confuse his view of nature or the scientific enterprise with theirs. Goethe was certainly no positivist born ahead of his time. He was remarkably perceptive as to the hidden assumptions of science as he knew it in his own lifetime. But his response was to develop a method of inquiry different in nearly every respect from the positivist school which would follow him.

[Arthur G. Zajonc, “Facts as Theory: Aspects of Goethe’s Philosophy of Science,” 227-28, Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal — Editors: Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler.]

Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, which first appeared in 1534, renders Job 9:11 as follows:

　　Siehe, er geht an mir vorüber,
　　ehe ich’s gewahr werde,
　　und wandelt vorbei,
　　ehe ich’s merke.

　　Lo, He passes by me
　　before I am aware of it,
　　and is transformed
　　before I can take note of it.

The German verb wandelt, meaning “to change,” or “to transform,” expresses a nuance of meaning not found in the King James version:

　　Lo, He goeth by me,
　　And I see Him not;
　　He passeth on also,
　　But I perceive Him not.

Goethe quotes Luther’s rendition of this verse as a thematic statement at the beginning of “Formation and Transformation,” the first section of his book On Morphology. Bertha Mueller, translator of Goethe’s Botanical Writings, observes: “Luther’s version contains the core of Goethe’s morphological thinking, namely, that each organic formation is a chain of transformations . . . In the passage from Job, Goethe interprets the ‘He’ as the active God-Nature as revealed in the development of organic life.” (p. 21)

“Formation and Transformation,” Mueller’s translation of Bildung und Umbildung, suggests an ongoing process of making and remaking, creating and re-creating, which is at least a first approximation of Whitehead’s idea of concrescence.

Parabase, a prefatory poem on the frontispiece of On Morphology, also resonates with this theme:

　　Freudig war, vor vielen Jahren,
　　Eifrig so der Geist bestrebt,
　　Zu erforschen, zu erfahren,
　　Wie Natur im Schaffen lebt.
　　Und es ist das ewig Eine,
　　Das sich vielfach offenbart:
　　Klein das Große, groß das Kleine,
　　Alles nach der eignen Art;
　　Immer wechselnd, fest sich haltend,
　　Nah und fern und fern und nah,
　　So gestaltend, umgestaltend —
　　Zum Erstaunen bin ich da.

Prose translation by David Luke:

“Many years ago, as now, my mind strove with eager delight to study and discover the creative life of Nature. It is eternal Unity in manifold manifestation: the great is little, the little is great, and everything after its kind; ever changing and yet preserving itself, near and far and far and near, and so shaping and reshaping itself—I am here to wonder at it.”

Note the gestalt (shape or form) in gestaltend and umgestaltend and how these two words repeat the pattern of Bildung and Umbildung. A polar rhythm pulsates throughout the poem . . .

　　Zu erforschen, zu erfahren
　　Klein das Große, groß das Kleine
　　Immer wechselnd, fest sich haltend
　　Nah und fern und fern und nah
　　So gestaltend, umgestaltend

. . . pulsing with a rhythm—the oscillation between two phases—that finds pervasive expression throughout the universe and operates at every level of reality, whether it be the ebb and flow of tides, the rhythms of heartbeat and breath, or atoms that vibrate many billions time per second.

This little poem is big with process themes, such as creativity as the very life of Nature:

　　Zu erforschen, zu erfahren,
　　Wie Natur im Schaffen lebt

　　To discover, to experience,
　　How Nature in creativity lives

The many and the one find expression in:

　　Und es ist das ewig Eine,
　　Das sich vielfach offenbart

　　And it is the eternal One
　　That in multiplicity is revealed.

In this line we hear the Whiteheadian theme of permanence and change:

　　Immer wechselnd, fest sich haltend

　　Ever changing, ever constant

The penultimate line reverberates again with the theme of creativity:

　　So gestaltend, umgestaltend —
　　Shaping, re-shaping

　　　(or)

　　Creating, re-creating
　　forming, transforming

The poem begins in joy (Freudig war) and ends where Plato says philosophy begins, in wonder (Erstaunen). Whitehead concurs: “Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the immensity of things, some purification of emotion by understanding.” (MT 168-69)

Finally, since panentheism is a doctrine of process theology, I will mention that there is reason to suppose that Goethe was a panentheist before his countryman and his contemporary, the philosopher Krause, coined the term. The following quote, by Goethe, sheds light not only on his panentheism, but also on the way of seeing that revealed this:

A pure, profound, inborn, and practiced way of viewing things—this has taught me unfailingly to see God in nature, nature in God, and it is this way of thinking that has formed the foundation of my existence.

[ . . . bei meiner reinen, tiefen, angeborenen und geübten Anschauungsweise, die mich Gott in der Natur, die Natur in Gott zu sehen unverbrüchlich gelehrt hatte, so daß diese Vorstellungsart den Grund meiner ganzen Existenz machte . . . ]

*       *       *       *

Jetzterday

Process thought talks about “the presence of the past” and scientist Rupert Sheldrake has written a book with that title. In William Faulkner’s novel, Requiem for a Nun, Gavin Stevens says: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In light of this, imagine my wonder at a word that, out of the blue, fluttered up from my unconscious late last night and made me smile:

jetzterday

. . . which blends jetzt, the German word for “now” (pronounced yetst), and yesterday.

I consulted my copy of A Concordance of Finnegans Wake and found that Joyce came close, very close indeed, to this word. At 570.09 he jests the reader with “jesterday,” in the following context:

I have heard anyone tell it jesterday (master currier with brassard was’t) how one should come on morrow here but it is never here that one today. Well but remind to think, you where yestoday Ys Morganas war and that it is always tomorrow in toth’s tother’s place. Amen. — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 570

Ich bin Hy Nun . . .

Nun, pronounced “noon,” is another German word for “now” and the clocks in that film, with their hands always moving, now till noon, and Grace Kelly, Coop’s new Quaker bride, is rather like a nun as she prepares to leave town when the noon train arrives (Do not forsake me, oh my darlin’) but who, nonetheless . . . is less the nun at the end when she stands by her man and helps him shoot Frank Miller dead.

*       *       *       *

Like Mark Twain and Huck Finn, I was born and raised in the state of Missouri. Hence, my delight in finding the following nugget in a book by James H. Austin, M.D.:

Show Me

I come from a state that raises corn, and cotton, and cockleburs, and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me. — Willard D. Vandiver (1854-1932)

Willard Vandiver, U.S. representative from Missouri, made these remarks over a century ago. Little could he guess at the time that his phrase, Show me would later become his state motto, and be enshrined on its license plates (let alone wind up on this page as an example of an important principle in Zen).

How does a Zen master test the depth of his students’ brief awakenings, and of their ongoing maturity on the Path? He challenges them to act. He tests the way they react to arcane, show-me situations. “Show me how you look at this flower!” “Show me your original face!” “Where is one?”

A Zen master wants no frothy eloquence. He’s all too familiar with your old biased words, has seen your other, stereotyped behaviors. He’s not interested in these. He’s looking for something new. He’s watching for your instant motor response. He’s paying attention during those first 500 event-related milliseconds of your body English. He wants to be shown hard evidence that you have been deconditioning your rigid ways of thinking and acting. If so, your movements will arise instantly, flow freely. Long years of authentic Zen training cultivate brisk, fluid actions arising from liberated sensorimotor pathways, not navel-gazing apathy or metaphysical speculation.

Your Zen master wants to see you manifest enlightened Zen behavior. To you, he’s saying “Show me.”  

Actions speak louder than words.

James H. Austin, M.D., Selfless Insight: Zen and the Meditative Transformations of Consciousness, pp. 217-18

*       *       *       *

Performative

A: “What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?”
B: “I don’t know and I don’t care!”

A: “People today don’t listen to what other people have to say.”
B: “Were you saying something?”
A: “What?”

A: What is amnesia?
B: I forget

Note the cleverness of these performative utterances that exemplify what they express.

Jürgen Habermas coined the term “performative contradiction” to refer to a discrepancy between the content of what is said and the very act of saying it. Or, to put it another way, performance contradicts proposition.

For example, if I engage someone in conversation and then say to that person, “I am a solipsist,” my recognition of that person, as someone to talk to, contradicts my claim to solipsism.

A: Can you hear me?
B: No.
A: Why not?
B: You’re deaf.
A: No, I’m mute.
B: I see.

HyC

*       *       *       *

Sacraments—
What’ll It Be: Wine or Tea?

D. T. Suzuki, a key figure in bringing Zen to the West, made an intriguing comment: that one contrast between Zen Buddhism and Christianity can be clearly seen in what the two religions use as sacramental substances: tea vs. wine.

Tea sharpens the mind and stills the emotions while wine, in both cases, does just the opposite. To quote Suzuki directly: “Tea keeps the mind fresh and vigilant, but it does not intoxicate.”

This makes me wonder whether Suzuki suffered a misconception here, for sacramental wine is imbibed by the jigger and not the Jeroboam.

As for Chado, the way of tea —

This is a ritual that over the centuries has been so deepened and refined that the tea ceremony became, and is, a living art form of beautifully nuanced simplicity.

茶道

Chado

Given the long and rich association of Bread and Wine, such as the Holy Eucharist, it’s interesting to observe that grape seeds and grains of wheat display a dipolar theme: the grape seed displays a distinctly phallic shape while a grain of wheat reveals the cloven contours of the female pudendum.

Here, in a natural symbolism, are male and female, yin and yang.

This is something I learned not from Playboy magazine but from the great Bulgarian mystic, Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov.

Speaking of wine, one other observation:

A common saying has it that in vino veritas, but the great Irish writer James Joyce has suggested that there is more truth in the phrase in risu veritas, “in laughter there is truth.” And Johan Huizinga, in his book Homo Ludens, writes: “It is worth noting that the purely physiological act of laughing is exclusive to man . . . The Aristotelian animal ridens (‘laughing animal’) characterizes man as distinct from the other animals almost more absolutely than homo sapiens.”

Pictures and statues of the Laughing Buddha are all over the place, but there seems to be little emphasis on the Laughing Jesus, in spite of a fine book by Elton Trueblood called The Humor of Christ. My copy has this caption under the title on the front cover — “A bold challenge to the traditional stereotype of a somber, gloomy Christ.”

Note: Suzuki’s comment can be found in his book, Zen and Japanese Culture, p. 273.

*       *       *       *

E. F. Schumacher as a Quadratic Thinker

In his book A Guide for the Perplexed (1977), E. F. Schumacher recognizes Four Great Truths that should be on any map, or guidebook, about how to live in the world:

1. The Great Truth about the world is that it is a hierarchic structure of at least four great “Levels of Being.”

2. The Great Truth about man’s ability to meet the world is the principle of adequateness.

3. The Great Truth about man’s learning concerns the “Four Fields of Knowledge.”

4. The Great Truth about living in this life, living in this world,  relates to the distinction between two types of problem, “convergent” and “divergent.”

Drawing on the ancient tradition of the Great Chain of Being, he then goes on to identify a hierarchy of four levels of being: 1) mineral, 2) plant, 3) animal, 4)human.

That which distinguishes plant from mineral, or the organic from the inorganic world, is life; consciousness distinguishes animals from plants; and the feature that distinguishes humans from animals is self-awareness. If mineral be designated as “m,” life as “x,” consciousness as “y,” and self-awareness as “z,” the four levels of being can be summed up as:

Human can be written: m + x + y + z

Animal can be written: m + x + y

Plant can be written: m + x

Mineral can be written: m

Schumacher next observes that the world, for us humans, is divided into inner experience and outer appearance. Here I am, a living center of consciousness and self-awareness, and out there is everything else, including other humans. A notable aspect of this is that inner experiences are invisible whereas outer appearances are visible and, as we ascend the Great Chain of Being, it is the invisibilities, or intangibles, the will begin to play an increasingly important role. These four combinations can be stated as:

1. I—inner
2. The world (you)—inner
3. I—outer
4. The world (you)—outer

These, for Schumacher, are the Four Fields of Knowledge and there are four questions which lead to these fields:

1. What is really going on in my own inner world?
2. What is going on in the inner world of other beings?
3. What do I look like in the eyes of other beings?
4. What do I actually observe in the world around me?

Or, to simplify further, they can be put this way:

1. What do I feel like?
2. What do you feel like?
3. What do I look like?
4. What do you look like?

The importance of these four fields to Schumacher can be seen in that he devotes an entire chapter to the analysis of each field.

In conclusion, it is interesting to note, as Frank Visser was the first to point out in his insightful book on Ken Wilber,* that Schumacher’s Four Fields seem to be a precursor to Wilber’s Four Quadrants model.

As the above discussion clearly shows, there can be little doubt, if any, that Schumacher was a serious quadratic thinker,

*Frank Visser, Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (2003)

*       *       *       *

What Did It Use To Mean
To Say “I Believe”?

Would it surprise you, as it greatly surprised me, to learn that  the word “believe” used to have a far different meaning that it has today?

In my Webster’s dictionary, the first  two definitions of “believe” are: “to take as true or real,” and “to have confidence in a statement or promise of (another person).” To believe, in the modern sense, means to give assent—intellectual assent—to a set of doctrines, statements, or claims. In this sense, the object of belief is a proposition.

For example, we in the Science of Mind profess a belief in what are known as the Ten Core Concepts. Christianity has the Apostles Creed wherein each of the three parts begins with the affirmation, “I believe . . .”

A look at the history of this word, however, reveals a very different story. “I believe” used to share the same meaning as the Latin word credo, the first word of the Apostle’s Creed. Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem coeli et terrae. (I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.) Credo, meaning “I believe,” derives from two proto-Indo-European roots: kerd-, “heart,” and dhe-, “to do,” or “to place.” What does this tell us about the original meaning of the word believe?

In short, to say “I believe” used to mean “I give my heart to.” “Believe” is also cognate with the German verb belieben, which, unlike its English cousin, still means “to cherish, to hold dear, to belove.”

In this older and original sense of the word, what, then, does this mean affirm belief in God? It means to give your heart to God, that is, to give your self, at its deepest level, to God. It means to affirm allegiance and loyalty, to feel that God, as the object of devotion, is worthy of unlimited love and veneration. More than giving intellectual assent to ideas about God, it means coming into a heart-felt relationship with God.

Note how in this, the original sense, the object of belief is not a proposition but a person.

For what this means in Christian terms, Borg sums it up nicely:

“Believing in Jesus in the sense of giving one’s heart to Jesus is the movement from secondhand religion to firsthand religion, from having heard about Jesus with the hearing of the ear to being in relationship with the Spirit of Christ. For ultimately, Jesus is not simply a figure of the past, but a figure of the present. Meeting that Jesus—the living Jesus who comes to us even now—will be like meeting Jesus again for the first time.”

For the change in meaning of the word “believe,” I am indebted to William Cantwell Smith, professor emeritus of religion at Harvard, who presents a clear and persuasive case for this in two books: Faith and Belief and Belief and History.

In Smith’s analysis, and by way of summary, four major shifts can be traced in the evolution of the word “believe.”

In the first, the object of the verb shifts from a person to a proposition. The subject of the verb, in the second, shifts from first to third person: from “I” to “he,” “she,” or “they.” Whereas “belief” was initially linked with truth, in the third shift there is a descent from true to dubious to false. As the prize example of this trend, Smith cites the 1966 Random House dictionary which defines the word “belief” as “an opinion or conviction” and then offers this illustration: “the belief that the world is flat.”

As Smith observes, “What could be more casually devastating? The first example that comes to mind for the compilers, and then the readers, of this impressive work is a belief that is false. Is it not an eloquent illustration that the word has changed its meaning?”

The fourth shift has to do with what are called “belief systems”—the unconscious or presupposed conceptual frameworks that underlie an individual’s worldview or cultural perspective. If this is unconscious, it has no application in first-person statements, that is, I cannot say, “I believe x, y, and z as my presupposed conceptual framework.” We can only make statements about the belief systems of other people, not our own.

The trajectory of change here is toward the impersonal and the abstract.

To maintain the pattern of making number 34 personal, would you believe that this is a picture of my Dad holding me just before he headed out for infantry combat in Europe early in World War II.

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