Start at page 70 for reformat of pictures

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Just how smart are we, anyway?

"The obstruction of the path by the mind and its conceptual discrimination is worse than poisonous snakes or fierce tigers."

-Ch'an Master Ta Hui, writing to Lo Meng-Pi (Swampland flowers, translated by J. C. Cleary, Shambala Publications 1977.)

...Or maybe frozen rocks.

Ta Hui goes on in a letter to Hsu Tun-Li that the Dharma is "the imponderable, the incalculable, where there's no way to apply intelligence or cleverness."

Combine this with Dogen's rejection of intellectualism- in his Shobogenzo, he makes the point that Zen practice has nothing to do with being stupid or clever- and we end up in what is for most of us a very unfamiliar place.

After all, we have constructed societies founded upon the premise that being smart is important. In the middle class- or what little is left of it as America's greedy CEO's slowly suck up all the money on the entire planet - our incomes usually depend on being smart.

To be sure, celebrity carves out some space in which to be successful and stupid, but it's not a good kind of space.

Is it now?

...And we could mention politics, but for the sake of what's left of everyone's sanity, let's not go there.

I live in America, where one of the sports among educated, competitive males of middle age is to one-up each other in a constant sparring match to see who's smarter, wittier, cleverer. In circles like this it's all about how swift and sharp your intellect is. This kind of intensely egoistic social exchange is wearying to me, but I participate when necessary. Of late I have tried to find ways to soften it where possible, because as I get older I can just feel myself getting stupider, almost by the minute, and it occurs to me that even though I'm considered to be quite smart, I'm just not going to be able to compete on the terms these other, immensely smarter guys are setting.

Our technology, our media, our institutes of higher learning- all of them worship intellect. Business, commerce, the internet- everything is about information exchange. We're swamped by what Ta Hui calls the conceptual discrimination of the mind; it's all we encounter in the average day.

But he's telling us we've got it wrong. In fact, just about every Zen master says we've got it wrong. And it's not just the Zen tradition: In the cloud of unknowing, the author states "You cannot know God with the mind." In Gurdjieff's work he finally told Ouspensky that some things had to be taken on faith- that is, they could not be grasped intellectually. Ouspensky got disgusted - I could be more polite and say dismayed, but I won't- by what he felt were Gurdjieff's increasingly religious leanings. He left him to pursue his own course- which, incidentally, ended in what was according to some accounts a downward spiral into excessive use of alcohol and depression.

As smart as Ouspensky was, I guess that didn't work out to well, huh?

In the end, the mind leads us in circles. I increasingly find that what is tangible isn't intellectual, doesn't consist of lists of facts and figures. It doesn't consist of creating or analyzing, either; it's not made up of thinking, or "doing," or knowing. Not the intellect's compartmentalized type of knowing, anyway.

It's made up of being and understanding. These stem from a deeper part of the organism than the part that's writing this- or reading it. It's what sinks into the bones.

Recently, for me, that can be briefly summarized in the following:

One green bottle of water,
One golden orchid against a blue-white vase,
Falling snow in the morning darkness,
The sensation of breath in the body,
A single leaf turning in the wind.

Those are the facts I have collected in the past two weeks. They won't do anyone but me much good, but they weigh more than thought, and I can still taste them and the way they went down when I swallowed them.

Tomorrow we'll return to more analysis.

or maybe not.

I have something cool to say about the location we inhabit and just how limited it is, but maybe it's not so important.

Thursday, February 1, 2007

Elements of consciousness

I was walking the famous dog Isabel on Wednesday morning at about 6:00 am when it struck me how cold it seemed to be.

In passing I briefly seized the massive iron girders of the bridge that crosses the Sparkill- iron straight from the heart of a dead star, I thought to myself- and realized that from a certain perspective, it wasn't cold at all.

It was warm.

The universe is composed of immeasurably vast stretches of space and innumerable planets where it is intensely colder than the range of temperatures we inhabit. On top of that, it is equally stuffed full of places where it is intensely hotter. In fact, I realized, our conscious beings inhabit an incredibly tiny, limited range of temperatures.

Put us anywhere outside that range and we're instantly done for.

Contrast that now, if you will, with the observation that everything is conscious. Consciousness , as I have pointed out before, is an irreducible property of the universe. It manifests in different ways according to level, but it is present everywhere, from the quantum level upwards. Viewed from the objective vantage point of both physics and my own subjective personal experiences, consciousness is fundamentally electromagnetic, and: no consciousness, no universe to be perceived, hence no universe.

So what we call (and perceive as) consciousness is a tiny thing that lives within a narrow range of temperatures. We can't know anything about consciousness outside of that range...

yet it is there.

Change the temperature twenty degrees and "I' am cold. But the astral-or planetary- level of consciousness includes a range that runs from the very hot core of the planet to the extremely cold outer reaches of the atmosphere. We're talking changes of tens of thousands of degrees, not to mention pressures that would squash us flatter than a bug. The earth's astral consciousness, however, is entirely comfortable within that deafening range.

Think about it a little further: let's take the sun. In order to have a relationship with that level of consciousness you'd have to be able to take on some real heat. I sometimes hear people speak about "developed" others having a "solar" nature, but when I look up at the sun- intending no disrespect towards the achievements of others, I think the term may be used a wee bit too loosely. Such allegory is a wonderful thing- up until it collides with the material consequences of nuclear physics.

This whole line of reasoning may seem abstract, but it isn't. It raises questions of level and scale, two properties of the universe that Mr. Gurdjieff spent a good deal of time discussing. In spiritual work, we make an effort to see our place and know what we are, under the presumption that we must know at least that much before we can add anything worth having to it.

So what we seek to have a relationship with- different levels of consciousness- is quite alien to us, not just in metaphysical but also in very physical ways.

What does all this mean? I do believe it has implications we should consider, but in the end I can't tell you. It is a more a line of inquiry meant to provoke a sense of wonder, and to serve as encouragement to use the mind to ponder.

Even if we aren't very smart.