To Crave & To Have: A Thing & Its Shadow

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desire, loss, Marilynne Robinson, Metaphysics, personal, Philosophy, quote

Photo by Edward Steichen

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. — Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980)

I wonder, is this true?

Certainly, sometimes the thing we’ve craved, once held in hand, does not live up to what was rounded out in exquisite detail when beheld in mind. Nor does the thing in hand last quite as long, if the thing we crave is not an object we can possess.

But is the thing in hand a mere shadow of the thing we craved for?

Is the matter-object we hold for but a moment in our hand less substantial than the ideal we crave and can bring to mind at moment’s notice and hold onto forever?

Sometimes I like to think so. I like to think those we’ve lost that are dear are as close as our thoughts of them fleshed out by memory and imagination. By a pure, keenly-honed desire to have and hold. Desire as sharp and hot as a welder’s flame.

I like to think that all I love and long for–that deeply felt-sense of them–is never lost. It’s shadow-substance may come and go and disappear as things do in a world of constant change. But its essence, the thing-in-itself that ever was, remains.

Brighter, clearer, than when held in hand.

Sweeter, purer than before.

The clean, keen edge of it never lost. Never wavering.

Stepping Barefoot into Reality with D.T. Suzuki

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books, Buddhism, D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, spirituality, Zen

I love this photo of the Zen sage D.T Suzuki. He was one of my first “gurus” if I, or he, believed in such things. His “Essays in Zen Buddhism” certainly was a huge influence in my life, as he was for so many, including Martin Heidegger, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, and John Cage.

So I was excited to find this photo and article about him on Maria Popova’s fascinating website Brainpickings. Many of the quotations she includes were ones I highlighted in my dog-eared copy so long ago. I highly recommend you reading her article on “How Zen Can Help You Cultivate Your Character.”

What I love about Suzuki’s approach to Zen is its emphasis on the psychological and the practical, and the turning away from the merely logical and rational, or verbal.

“The truth of Zen is the truth of life,” he writes, “and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.”

He goes on to explain:

“In the actual living of life there is no logic, for life is superior to logic. We imagine logic influences life, but in reality man is not a rational creature so much as we make him out; of course he reasons, but he does not act according to the result of his reasoning pure and simple. There is something stronger than ratiocination.”

“Zen is to be explained, if at all explained it should be, rather dynamically than statically. When I raise the hand thus, there is Zen. But when I assert that I have raised the hand, Zen is no more there.”

“Zen therefore ought to be caught while the thing is going on, neither before nor after.”

We must see directly into the thing in itself as itself, into the “suchness” of life: “responding to a call, listening to a murmuring stream, or to a singing bird, or any of our most ordinary everyday assertions of life.”

To do this: “We must first of all acquire a new point of view of looking at things, which is altogether beyond our ordinary sphere of consciousness.”

When we do: “The old world of the sense has vanished, and something entirely new has come to take its place. We seem to be in the same objective surrounds, but subjectively we are rejuvenated, we are born again.”

Yet this new “sphere of consciousness” must be grounded in our practical, ordinary lives.

“Psychologically there is a most intimate and profound relationship between a practical turn of mind and a certain type of mysticism .  .  .  If mysticism is true its truth must be a practical one, verifying itself in every act of ours, and most decidedly, not a logical one.”

He goes on to quote the Zen poet Hokoji:

“How wondrously supernatural,

and how miraculous this!

I draw water, and I carry fuel.”

This too is what I love about Suzuki’s approach to Zen, his emphasis on work, and on work as love.

“For the soundness of ideas must be tested finally by their practical application. When they fail in this–that is, when they cannot be carried out in everyday life producing lasting harmony and satisfaction and giving real benefit to all concerned–to oneself as well as to others–no ideas can be said to be sound and practical.”

“The fact is that if there is any one thing that is most emphatically insisted upon by the Zen maters as the practical expression of their faith, it is serving others, doing work for others: not ostentatiously, indeed, but secretly without making others know of it. Says Eckhart [Christian mystic], ‘What a man takes in by contemplation he must pour out in love.’ Zen would say, ‘pour out in work,’ meaning by work the active and concrete realization of love.”

Throughout his essays he quotes generously from Zen masters and poets, and from Christian mystics and other Western thinkers and philosophers. Thus he weaves together common threads as well as pointing out differences between Zen and Western philosophies and spiritual practices.

Popova calls his essays “a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.”

I would have to agree with that. Certainly I used it as a “toolkit” for my own own understanding of Zen and its application to ordinary life.

Suzuki writes:

“Life as it is lived suffices. It is only when the disquieting intellect steps in and tries to murder it that we stop to live and imagine ourselves to be short of or in something. Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If you are at all tempted to look into it, do so while letting it flow.

Zen . . . must be directly and personally experienced by each of us in his inner spirit. Just as two stainless mirrors reflect each other, the fact and our own spirits must stand facing each other with no intervening agents. When this is done we are able to seize upon the living, pulsating fact itself.

That is what I work to do:

To grasp the fact of life and its sufficeness with bare hands.

To “step barefoot into reality” as the poet puts it.

Although, too often this is forgotten in the busyness of things, the turmoil and petty pleasures that swirl around us all and steal our attention.

But I’m beginning to understand that even these upsets and petty pleasures have a place within the larger scheme of things, if only we would see them as such:

Oh, how wondrously supernatural,

and miraculous this!

The spilled cup, the dime novel.”

In a life that suffices, nothing is wasted.

 

 

Nature and Consciousness – Seeing Things as They Are

Tags

Consciousness, Metaphysics, Nature, Perception, Philosophy, reality, Science, spirituality

© Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Every time I write about nature I get deep into human consciousness. You can’t really separate the two. There is no “nature” – no way to identify, quantify, categorize, articulate, or understand it—apart from human consciousness, from how we think and talk about it.

We can’t study or explore or write about nature as something separate from ourselves, our own senses and experiences, our own thinking, perceiving, observations, experimentation. In that sense, nature is subjective, no matter how hard we try to objectify it.

This is not new, of course. Better writers and thinkers, from different disciplines, have explored this in more depth and detail that I can here.

This grand book the universe . . . is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it: without these, one wanders around in a dark labyrinth.  —Galileo, Astronomer

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from the experience of the world . . . .  –Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenologist

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. –Edward Sapir, Linguist

If the world exists and is not objectively solid and preexisting before I come on the scene, then what is it? The best answer seems to that the world is only a potential and not present without me or you to observe it. . . . All of the world’s many events are potentially present, able to be but not actually seen or felt until one of us sees or feels.  –Fred Allen Wolf, Physicist

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.
-–Rainer Maria Rilke, Poet

The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. –John Muir, Naturalist

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the processions of the seasons. There is nothing . . . with which I am not linked.  –Carl Jung, Psychologist

See this rock over there? This rock’s me!  –Australian Aborigine

But in the ordinary play of our day, we forget this. We experience everything outside ourselves as “not me,” “alien,” “other.” Even our own bodies are commonly experienced as “not me.” We say “my stomach growled,” or “my foot fell asleep,” or “my sinuses are acting up,” because they seem to act involuntarily, with a mind of their own, without our conscious consent. As does nature, and other people, and the things we create—toasters and cars and computers.

Separating the whole of life and existence into parts is a useful way of talking and thinking about things.

But too often we fail to put everything back together and see how interdependent it all is, how embedded we are in the whole, and the whole in us. When we fail to do so we lose a vital understanding of ourselves and the universe, and we act in ways that may be harmful to the whole.

The see the ocean in a drop of water, to see ourselves in everyone we meet, is not, as some think, merely a poetic and rosy way of looking at the world. It’s to see things as they actually are.

Original posted 8-9-2012

Dawkins and the Wonder of It All

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books, Cosmology, Deborah J. Brasket, God, Metaphysics, mystery, Philosophy, Richard Dawkins, Science, sense of wonder, the universe, Unweaving the Rainbow

Hubble Mist M43_HST

It is true that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it no one thinks to thank God. –Emily Dickinson

If one of the greatest attributes of a book about science is its ability to incite readers to think, to argue with its premise, pick it apart, wrestle it down, and inspire new lines of inquiry, then the opening of Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, which I critiqued and rewrote in my last post, succeeds. Exceedingly well.

After reading his opening, like Jacob wrestling with that angel, I could not let it go till it blessed me.

The problem with Dawkins’ musing on the wonder of birth, the near-miraculous odds that any one of us was born at all, is that he did not take his argument far enough. He stops with our death, as if that’s the end of it. But does the mind-boggling chance that I be born at all preclude the equally mind-boggling chance I be born again? Within an infinite set of possibilities, why couldn’t we, with another roll of the dice, each be born a second time?

I’m not so much interested in arguing that such a thing is possible, as I am wondering why it would be impossible. Improbably, yes. But impossible?

If there is some natural law prohibiting it, I’m sure a scientist will tell me. But she will be speaking from her own limited understanding of the universe as we now know it. There is no ultimate authority on this subject or any other. There are no final answers in an infinitely expanding and evolving universe, or in the science that explains it.

The most wondrous thing I can think of is how miniscule our knowing is, and how huge our unknowing. We’ve touched our toe on a beach of understanding that stretches beyond an endless horizon.

One thing I do commend Dawkins for is his eagerness to show us how a scientific understanding of the natural world, the “unweaving of the rainbow” as Keats put it, need not dampen our wonder and awe of creation. As children we looked up in wonder at those twinkling stars that seemed so magical, and we do so still. Our delight in them is not diminished, but heightened by our knowledge.

Wonder itself is a marvelous thing in the old-fashioned sense of the word (miraculous) and defies logic.

Perhaps humankind’s “need for god” that Dawkins and others so lament, is not so much, as they surmise, to create a super-powerful supernatural being to pin all our hopes and fears upon, but to give a name to our awe and wonder, to whatever wove this amazing phenomenon of creation into existence. The knowledge that our universe was spun out of nothing and is spinning still past anything we can ever hope to grasp only increases our sense of awe and wonder, as well as our need to name that which makes us to bow our heads in humility before it.

If stones can speak, dust shape itself into flesh, and atoms evolve a consciousness, as our current understanding of the universe has proved itself capable, then what not is possible?

Dawkins decries humanity’s need for mystery, as if it were the enemy of science. But I would argue that mystery is the handmaid of science, spurring us to understand what is, and to dream of what is yet to come.

Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky. –Emily Dickinson

A Dream Within a Dream Within a . . .

Tags

choosing our paths, Dreams, Insight, magical thinking, Metaphysics, reality, waking up

My daughter’s wedding day had arrived and everything that could go wrong went wrong.  We arrived at the church only to discover no one had come to decorate it. The food we’d ordered was half-prepared.  My daughter showed up in her beautiful gown, but we’d forgotten to get her hair done or her make-up.  It was so horrible, we cancelled the wedding and sent everyone home. The wedding party climbed into a car and was driving away when my daughter said, “Stop! I can’t take this anymore, I just want it over!”

So she forced the car to pull over at a tiny diner and announced that’s where she was getting married.  I tried to talk her into going to someplace nicer, where it wasn’t so shabby and dirty. But she insisted. I remembered how I had planned to hang all the beautiful photos of her wedding on our walls at home. But how could we take photos of this! My worst nightmare was happening and it was all my fault. I shouldn’t have left the wedding planning up to her. I should have taken charge. I should have had a check-off list and made sure everything had turned our as planned. But it was too late. I screwed up. And now all my dreams for her wedding were ruined.

Then I woke up with a raging headache. And a sense of doom I could not shake.

It was crazy! Why was I having this dream?  My daughter had already had the most beautiful wedding imaginable just last year.  And she had planned it all!  I hadn’t had to lift a finger. Why would I be worried about her wedding?

Then I had a flash of insight. One after the other.

#1 Flash of Insight

This was just a dream! There had never been a reason to be so upset and despondent.  I could have changed the dream at any point–decorated the church, fixed her hair. I could have created the perfect wedding, if only I had realized I was dreaming. If only I had known I had the power to do so.

#2 Flash of Insight

This dream wasn’t about my daughter! It’s about my son. About the terrible addiction that has ruined his life, the beautiful life I had dreamed for him. And I blamed myself.  I shouldn’t have left something as important as his life up to him! I should have taken charge. I should have planned better. But now everything was ruined and there was nothing I could do about it.

#3 Flash of Insight

Maybe I’m still dreaming!  I remember how real it all seemed in my dream. Like it was really happening.  So much so that even when I woke, I couldn’t shake the sense of sadness and failure. Maybe I will wake up and find out that this is all just a dream of addiction.  Maybe in “reality,” he’s living the perfect life I’d always wanted for him, just as my daughter had had her perfect wedding.

Maybe I’d wake to find him in his perfect house with his loving wife, surrounded by his beautiful children, happy and healthy.  He’d flash me a big grin and put his arms around me and say, “Silly mama. Why so sad? You were just dreaming!”

#4 Flash of Insight

But if I can’t wake up, maybe I can at least practice lucid-dreaming, wake up enough to know this isn’t real, and that I can change things, if I could only figure out how. It’s possible, right? Isn’t change possible?

#5 Flash of Insight

Maybe this is what they call “magical thinking.”

I keep thinking of those talks by Alan Watts that I posted here not long ago. He talks about the interconnectivity of the universe and how it has evolved into human consciousness–how the very cells of our bodies and brains are made of star stuff. We are the eternal universe, he tells us. Each of us, individually, is a pinprick of the whole, and altogether we are the whole itself.

Is believing this more fantastic, more “magical,” than believing in the Big Bang in the first place? Or that an infinite number of galaxies are spinning out in space, or being gobbled up by black holes? Or more magical than the “fact” of all those electrons and neutrons spinning in the cells of our bodies like tiny galaxies?  What could be more fantastical or magical than reality! The reality we accept on “faith” because we believe what science has revealed to us.

Watts also mentioned this possibility: That we each are sparks of the divine–whatever force that created all we know–living an infinite number of lives over and over.  Sometimes we choose easy paths, sometimes difficult ones.  Sometimes we just want to see how much we can take, how far we can push ourselves, how bad it can get before we turn ourselves around.

Did my son choose his path? Did I choose mine?  Are there layers of reality, as I wrote about in my last post? Are our night dreams and waking dreams just various stages in the ever-expanding understanding of who we really are? Will we wake to another understanding of reality and realize this life is just a dream within a dream within a dream . . . and each life is just as “real” or as “magical” as the next one?

We once believed the earth was flat and the distant ocean spilled off into nothingness. Later that the sun circled the earth, and we felt smug and special at the center of the universe.  Then we woke up.

What more will we come to understand about reality–the universe and ourselves–as the eons unfold?

Wake up, Deborah, wake up.