notes on meditation – ouroboros as consciousness

when the mind turns inwards to observe itself, it can be modeled with a mild variant of ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail. in my version ouroboros is a dude snake, his name is oury, and he is tasting his own tail (instead of eating it). also, he has the odd ability of being able to make his skin taste like whatever he wants. this model has the following component meanings:

ouroboros – consciousness
head – the witnessing or observing aspect of consciousness
tail – the witnessed or observed aspect of consciousness
taste of the skin – state of consciousness

note that oury is not two separate snakes – he is one. in the same way, the observing aspect of the mind may seem separate from that which is being observed, but it’s not. to “observe one’s self” is just a technique – not a true separation of self into two parts.

so how does a snake get to be tasting his own tail, anyway? the very first stage of the meditative path occurs when oury decides he would like to taste his own tail. at this point, he is to short to taste his own tail. he stretches his tongue out and tries, but he cannot reach. the stretching, however, is an exercise and oury becomes longer. this is the second stage of meditation – the continuous attempt.

finally, there comes a point where oury is pretty much long enough to form a circle – the third stage of meditation. he runs his tongue over his own tail and… discovers that the taste is not so great. in the metaphor it is clear that oury should be able to change the taste of his own tail, being in charge of it. but in our consciousness, this does not seem to be the case (at first). when you meditate and observe your own fears, anxieties, angers, &c, you do not have the understanding that the observer and the observed form a continuum of consciousness – you do not yet understand your own power in determining who you are.

this is why meditative instructions always insist on the importance of attitude. in particular, equanimity: you (the witness or observer) must stay balanced, kind, impartial. you must not be perturbed by what you observe, nor must you judge or reject it. why is this so important? because the observed and the observer are one! the tail and the head are connected. when the tail tastes like spoiled ranch dressing, the head does too. but when the head practices creating the taste of fresh baked bread, the tail must also change its taste.

feeling afraid or angry is a bad habit. it feels automatic and out of control because it has been in place for so long. by creating an artificial distinction such as observer and observed, you are in effect creating the opportunity to practice being in different states of consciousness. while the observed stays afraid and angry, the observer is free to try to be loving and accepting. if someone said “ok just stop being angry and be calm,” you would probably get even angrier and might punch them in the stomach. but the instructions “just observer your angry and let it be there” are doable, because nobody is asking the angry person to vanish (which would invalidate the anger and make it worse), but merely to co-exist. it’s a lesser task, but a doable & effective one.

after a lot of practice, the observer masters being loving and accepting regardless of the state of the observed. then, whenever the observed becomes unruly, all you have to do in response is enter the observer state-of-mind, which is just another way of saying “meditate.” when the observer becomes more powerful than the observed, the observed must follow the observer. it is a shift in the power dynamics of consciousness. when oury learns how to make his head taste like fresh bread, the tail is sure to follow because he is just one snake.

what i just described above is the practice of self-awareness. self-consciousness, on the other hand, is an unskilled version of self-awareness. instead of observing the self with kindness & patience, self-conscious observation is all about fear and judgment. and so, when you observe yourself with fear & judgment, the observed learns to embody fear & judgment, thus making everything worse.

where do our self-observation habits come from? the reflexive property of consciousness is inherited from others. we are not born with the ability to observe ourselves. self-reflection is learned when we, as children, observe others observing ourselves. this is akin to two snakes being locked together, each one tasting the tail of the other. as a kid, you watch your parents watch you. if they look at you with kindness and patience, you eventually transfer that attitude to your own observer when it is finally cemented in early puberty. you inherit your parents’ (& others’) attitudes towards you no matter what those attitudes are.

none of these attitudes are fixed. they are just initial conditions that you have to work with. you can practice observing yourself with new attitudes, day by day, and you will find that change is possible. just make a sincere effort to see yourself in a certain light, and that light will steadily become brighter and easier to establish.

terse notes on tao & truth

although the tao that can be written about is not the true tao, i will write about it anyway. tao is the way. it is the natural flow of the universe. it seems that to be human is to have the opportunity to actually not go with the tao (this is of course only sensible from a dualistic perspective; in unity nothing can be not tao). self-consciousness (as opposed to self-awareness) is the action of mind attempting to grasp mind, thereby interrupting mind’s natural tao-aligned activity. it’s something i experience all the time.

how, then, does a self-conscious person become attuned to the tao? self-consciousness is first used as a tool to study self-consciousness. it is a bad habit, so it (for most) cannot be abandoned without force. and force (i.e. exerting will on the universe as opposed to acting effortlessly with the tao) is necessary to change habits. so to abandon self-consciousness we must use self-consciousness. to transcend ego we must use ego.

my approach is to try to be self-conscious of self-consciousness. it is difficult to describe exactly how this works, but i try to catch myself catching myself. as a result, i instead catch myself doing other things in my mind that themselves encourage self-consciousness. i focus on one category of mental activity that causes self-consciousness at a time, and when i become sharply aware of it concurrent with its arising, it ceases to have power and becomes integrated into the flow. then it vanishes. some examples of these “other things”: insecurity, obligation, worry, insincerity &c. this is where meditation is useful. it is the activity that trains directed and on-the-spot awareness.

‎”You must chase your own tail until you finally and fully absorb the fact that it is attached to your ass.” -Ruth Kim Webley

we have thus established the conceptual framework behind the goal of being in tune with the tao. to reach a place of no self-consciousness or no ego you must abandon the last goal (which is also the first) of attaining the goal. but this can only be done when the goal of attainment is the ONLY obstacle remaining. while other obstacles remain, they must be addressed, and they can only be addressed (as far as i’ve figured out) by a willful self-conscious self.

before ever attaining the “final goal,” you will spontaneously find yourself in tune with the tao. or, more accurately, not find yourself, but will just BE in tune with the tao. but it will come & go until the obstructions are cleared off. it is the feeling of being in the flow. for example, when you’re skiing or in love or absorbed in a movie your self can kind of vanish. this is this being in accord with the tao.

“Having discerned his own self as irrelevant, he saw with true clarity.” -Chuang Tzu

tao is moving truth. it is not only the way everything is, but also the way everything moves, flows, changes, and becomes.

“Truth is the coincidence of thought and G-d, the Kotzker maintained, or the coincidence of the individual’s life with the will of G-d… There are no proofs to validate ultimate Truth, since perception and reason say one thing and Truth may reveal the opposite. The only alternative is to eliminate the self, to grow in faith. Faith is more perceptive than reason.” -Abraham Joshua Heschel

from heschel we have another definition for tao – the will of g-d. note that the old hebrew g-d is a dualistic one. he has power and he exerts it over the universe. but tao is a unity-based model. the tao is the universe-in-itself.

“To be truth is one and the same thing as knowing the truth… The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.” -Kierkegaard

to catch the truth is to have the self AND to have the truth at the same time. but this is precisely what cannot occur. only when the self steps aside is there room for the truth to enter. when the truth “catches you,” it supplants you and you are gone.

transforms

this post is about solving problems by transforming domains. if this reads confusingly, don’t worry about it – i’ve got two examples. the first is from math!

there’s a famous piece of math called the fourier transform (FT) that is absolutely vital to all communication technologies. we would be utterly hosed without it. here are the barebone basics. the FT is a method by which you can take some signal in time (like, say, a one second clip of your voice) and look at what frequencies are in it. i’m sure you have all seen visualizers or equalizers that do just that: you sing into a machine and a screen shows you what frequencies are in your voice and how loud they are. that’s done with the fourier transform.

one cool thing about the fourier transform (there are tons) is that it is used to easily solve problems that are intractable without it. how? well, it takes time signals and turns them into frequency signals. it changes domains or perspectives. whether you look at a signal in time or in frequency, it is the same signal – you can undo the FT and then you have the signal you started with again. so what do we gain by doing it? this isn’t a mathy word, but the answer is perspective. in the frequency domain, certain facts are obvious that were completely obscured in the time domain. one example is filtering. let’s say you record your voice and there is a high pitched whine in the background. if you look at your signal in time, you’ll see a bunch of squiggles. your voice and the unwanted whine are all on top of one another & there is no way to separate them out. so you use the FT, get to see your signal in the frequency domain and then, kablammo, there is the whine, obvious as a pineapple in purgatory.

if that confused you even more, no worries i have a more human example! i met an italian woman in burma. she’s a psychiatrist (or psychologist?), and has published 10 books about a method of therapy she invented. here’s how it works: the client is asked to come up with a fairy tale. not to think too hard about it, but just let it come. inevitably, the client gets stuck in the story. a hard-to-resolve event has occurred, and it’s not clear what to do about it. further instructions are given: keep the fairy tale in the back of your head over the next few weeks & pay close attention to what’s going on in your life. nine times out of ten, the client stumbles onto a solution to their fairy tale problem, and manages to finish it.

then, the fairy tale is analyzed by the psychiatrist. the basic idea here is jung-inspired. the fairy tale is a mythologized story of the client’s life. the place where they get stuck is a version of their main Obstacle – the one for which they sought out the psychiatrist in the first place. the idea is that the obstacle is simpler to solve in the domain of the fairy tale because of its unconstrained nature – anything goes in the new domain that the client’s life story & self are transformed into. just like in the fourier transform, a signal (the story & the self) is transformed into a different domain (the fairy tale domain) and the problem at hand is solved there. the solution to the fairy tail block is the solution to the real dilemma that it stands for, but it is easier to arrive at in the seemingly fictional universe of the fairy tale than our “real world.” why? because there are no limits. got an evil wizard problem? his dragon eats him! haunted forest? just get your father, the king, to hire 10000 lumberjacks. you get the idea. the full creativity of the mind is let loose because the client isn’t blocking her or himself at all; there are no considerations of practicality or consequence. the fear goes away, leaving behind pure curiosity.

the distilled wisdom is this: domain, language, perspective matter. the way something is framed or spoken of or understood will change what it does to you and what you can do with/to it. this is why it is a great idea to look at various metaphoric, symbolic or narrative systems, and see what each of them can do for you. you don’t have to be stuck in one domain! all are admissable & good in their own way. go out and study: jung, zen, tarot, western philosophy, science, math, religion, art (my favs). all of them are useful & all of them are true. as the principia discordia says:

GP: Is Eris true?
M2: Everything is true.
GP: Even false things?
M2: Even false things are true.
GP: How can that be?
M2: I don’t know man, I didn’t do it.

notes on being a pilgrim

wikipedia: “A pilgrim (from the Latin peregrinus) is a traveller (literally one who has come from afar) who is on a journey to a holy place.”

i’m in the “everything is holy” camp, so we can just cut the last part of that definition, and get a good summary of how travel felt (actually, how i remember it feeling): i was a pilgrim on a journey. the journey ended when i came back to seattle, and began: living in a place, waking up every morning in the same bed, working 5 days a week, looking forward to week-ends, and seeing the same lovely people on a regular basis.

the journey has ended – but so suddenly that my mind is still half-operating in pilgrim mode. in other words, i am stuck seeking, even though i am realizing daily & hourly that i have everything i have ever wanted.

i have everything i have ever wanted?! ok, mind, “do i want anything else?” a resounding SILENCE. what can this mean? having everything you have ever wanted & wanting nothing else should, theoretically, lead to contentment. however, i am feeling an inner squirminess. when i look at it, it resolves into the image of me-shaped dude, astride a horse/train/plane, in perpetual forward dive. it is the inner pilgrim, still operating, the off switch invisible, yelling g-d-things at the inner porch-&-rocking-chair aficionado.

what was it like to be one of the pilgrims in the far-away days of their prominence? i imagine men & women, covered in yellow dust, finally arriving at some holy site at the top of a murderous mountain. they kneel, they pray, their hearts elope with g-d’s, and, having done exactly what they set out to do, they turn around to go home, minds aglow with the all-glow, faith & love tattooed for another decade onto their consciousness.

this did not happen to me. lots of things were tattooed on my consciousness, but i do not know what they are. something happened, but i understand it poorly because i explicitly forbade myself any goals & expectations before & during the trip. i sought only to understand seeking, and moved because staying still made no sense. there was no holy site to finally arrive at (even though i reached plenty) because i am committed to the idea that the holy is a congenital halo – everyone’s got one & it’s always encircling your head.

where does a pilgrimage of my sort end? my zen-pilgrimage was a contradiction in terms – wandering around looking for the holy, and at the same time convinced that the holy is everywhere. maybe the point of the trip was to viscerally convince myself that holy IS everywhere; turn that idea into a knowledge. have i done that? i don’t know (yet)!

all i know is that i’m home & i have no idea how to be home. my pilgrim-mind keeps hinting that i should DO something. but when i try to fit a specific DO, i can’t find one. i can’t find one because i now believe too strongly that only when our own little-self seeking is quieted down, the big-self universe-sez voice can be heard within.

this is where it gets personal. i know what little-self (ego) sounds like, but i’m not sure i know what big-self (universe) sounds like. sometimes i know. other times, i am so filled with doubt, i want to sobbingly seek comfort in richard dawkins’s besweatered, bony shoulder. i oscillate, and it’s hard, but i suppose this is what faith is – i don’t know that when i mellow out the little-self, the big-self will just appear loud & clear in its place. if i knew, it wouldn’t be faith. i just believe in the reality of the big-self, and so i am, for the moment, stuck. half of me wants to integrate every part of my life into a bad-ass do-do-do journey, and the other half wants to completely surrender & listen for instructions from the universe. i (whoever that is) am rooting for surrender at this point, because i’ve been into the DO thing and it’s not for me (too much stress, not enough joy).

meditation retreat very-much-post-mortem

back in jan & feb, i spent 3 weeks meditating in northern thailand. it was intense, but the last bit was the most overwhelming thing i’ve ever put myself through. we were instructed to not sleep for 72 hours, stay in our room (food was brought to our door), not shower, and mediate the whole time (i did 90 minutes meditation with 30 minute breaks). to be honest, i did go to sleep for 3 hours sometime during the first night. and there were plenty of unintentional micro-naps.

it was as hard as it sounds. there were no chairs in my room to rest in, just a bed. the temptation to lie down was overwhelming. i would alternate between despair at the thought of all those hours of sitting & stewing in my own consciousness juices, and laughter at the fact that i had chosen to do it of my own “free will.”

sometime during the second day, the internal pressure i had been feeling became extreme & obscure. i felt a massive confusion, but without an underlying question to ask. i stopped doing the walking meditation, sat down on the bed, & tried to think it through. nothing happened; the mind was a rusty steam engine without any water to boil. i stood back up, and continued to do walking meditation. after one more step, a vast & awful mantle lifted from the inside of my mind.

i saw the process of division. right there in front of my mind’s eye, the world was being split apart into two: self & not-self. it was odd to see & i am not sure if the description will make sense, but here i go anyway. there is thing in my mind (and probably in yours) that puts a label on everything that it encounters. the label is either “self” or it is “not-self.” when i looked at my hand, i felt/saw the label of “self” arise. when i heard the sound of a truck, i felt the label of “not-self.” my orange towel was “self” because it was mine, but the orange curtain was “not-self” because i didn’t own it. everything from the five senses got a label. even thoughts! certain concepts carried label of self like “friendly” and “human,” but the rest (like “cruel” or “lizard”) carried the label of not-self.

not only that, there was a different feeling to things that were “self.” i felt protective over them, and wanted them to continue. even negative stuff – the label of “anxiety-prone” had the label of self, and this may be why my anxiety sticks around way longer than i’d expect – anxiety is marked as “self” and, therefore, sustained as all other aspects of self are. it’s an extension of the basic biological need to survive.

this process is usually automatic & below the threshold of consciousness, but for about 3 minutes, the whole show was on display. larry rosenberg once summarized buddha’s whole teaching with “never attach to anything as me or mine.” i was given a hard-earned glimpse into the functioning of this attachment process. it freaked me out. i ran out of the room to find a teacher, who then calmed me down.

for a few months after that, this experience was hard to think about; i didn’t know what to make of it. a week or so ago, however, i started thinking about it again. this time, it made a lot more sense. two common mystical statements are “everything is one” and “the self is an illusion.” when i first encountered these, i could only speculate as to their meaning. but in the context of my experience, i think i have some sense as to what they refer. the “self” is an illusion in the sense that it exists as a hodgepodge of labels, aggregated & sustained according to some hidden logic i’ve yet to fully penetrate.

so how does this relate to meditation? the labels are not permanent, and part of the meditative process is de-labeling. an example. after my first meditation retreat, i came back home & abruptly stopped reading a whole genre of novels (difficult, depressing, post-modern fiction). i was reading them not because i enjoyed reading them, but because i had conceived of myself as someone who reads such books. to not read them made me anxious in a very specific way that i now associate with a loss of some aspect of self.

since then, the de-selfing process has continued. i am actively stripping down my conceptual self. this allows the natural, unadorned, always-changing self to emerge. when sergey ceases to conceive of himself as someone who dislikes asparagus, maybe sergey will realize that he now likes asparagus. to not be bound by ideas of self is to be exactly who you are at every moment, and to allow that person to change as s/he does.

this also brings into perspective the claims of advanced meditators wrt experiencing oneness. when the machinery of self-labeling is turned off, automatically all is one! the hypothesis here is that “self” and the experience of it exists primarily as a construct in the mind. we only feel separate from the the rest of the cosmos because of semantics. the “self” is a complex network of concepts, upheld by an active piece of the mind. when it ceases to be upheld, it dissolves. then there is no self, and when there is no self, there is no not-self. all returns to being one continuous field of being.

that’s just a hypothesis though. i haven’t figured out how to turn this thing off yet. will get back to you when i do =).

packing list for lengthy solo travel

here

it’s exhaustive. a few minor things are missing, & it has way more than you need. use discretion.

l’vov & homecoming part 1

going back to l’vov/l’viv after 17 years was like borrowing the keys to my mind’s basement from c. g. jung. few of the places or people i saw linked up to specific memories, but the feeling of familiarity & nostalgia was overwhelming. my internal monologue was waxing melancholy & nabakoving all over the place. it was fun to hang out with my pop’s old friends & drink way more often than i’m used to.

l’vov is one of the prettiest towns i’ve ever seen. growing up there is probably the reason i have snobby/european art preferences (i am ok with this).

now i’m back in the u.s., in skokie, il. i should be back in seattle in early june.

END BONDERMAN BLOG. THANK YOU FOR STAYING TUNED.

BEGIN MISC. BLOG. NO PROMISES.

bulgaria

bulgaria:

1] everyone i met is friendly & relaxed, but, deep down inside, concerned about the economy & the shrinking population. economic depression is happening like woah.
2] drafts & wet hair are as much a worry here as they are amongst my family.
3] i don’t speak bulgarian, but russian is good enough. i understand and am understood, sort of.
4] the mountains are short but lovely. there are wild horses (i saw 10 live ones & 1 dead pony), poorly marked trails, and wooden huts with cheap tasty meals served by elderly materteral women.

me:

1] i’m at a train station, waiting for a 24 hour train to lvov to arrive.
2] it is midnight.
3] exhaustion is making my bones feel flimsy.
4] the new mountain goats album is stuck in my head.
5] i wonder what YOU are doing right now.

eastern europe

i wafted over to istanbul from tel aviv for twoish days of frantic eating, gawking (the aya sophia was built by primordial space aliens to dispense grim, psychic advice) & being mistaken for a turk by the locals. istanbul is massive. it somehow manages to be both islamic & secular at the same time. the street meat is so tasty that i should really stop calling myself a vegetarian & accept the mantle of omnivorism. i promise to eat meat & fish responsibly but without pontification when i get back to the states.

now i am in plovdiv, bulgaria. my russian has not been as helpful as i had hoped – bulgarian is written in cyrillic, but very few words overlap, and not too many folks speak russian. haven’t been here long enough to make impressions, and not sure what i am doing here. i think at this point in the trip all goals have fallen away like late autumn leaves, and i am in the business of raw existence ($200/lb).

friends of friends have generously offered their couch & company elsewhere in the country (provadiya), and i am slowly making my way over there. i finish in home-sweet(?)-home lvov/lviv/lemburg, from which i fly to AMERICA on april 22nd.

o things are ending & and i em exhausted. my brain is simmering like an old coffee pot. the contents are rich, goopy, filled with potential. i miss everybody, but see you soon!

tzfat and judaism & zen

tzfat sits on a mountain & is made out of old magic. the old city was designed by spiders with vertigo. ancient alleys & artists, kabbalah classes & falafel cooked up by mystics. i wouldn’t mind living here.

i spent a week in tzfat, at the livnot campus in the old city (the livnot folks organized my birthright trip two years ago). they had a big group visiting, so i slept in THE CAVE, a damp 500 year old room unearthed within the last 30 years. i slept dreamless like a stone 6 out of 7 nights, and dreamed pools of blood & cannibalism on the seventh. it sounds creepy but the dream felt very ordinary & non-fearful.

i went to tzfat to learn a bit of kabbalah. all the buddhist stuff i’ve been learning in asia is good, but i don’t feel like a buddhist at heart. i like being jewish & i like judaism. the only thing is – i don’t really feel connected to the actual faith/theology of it. my gut (and tanya classes) told me that the mystical aspect (kabbalah) would be more up my alley, and it was right!

kabbalah is a vast complex network of concepts that exist in their own mindspace, and can only be accessed by continual & lengthy study. but i am lucky – i met a bunch of VERY knowledgeable folks who were willing to sit down and talk to me using terms & ideas that i already had in my brain.

one of these, david friedman, has a website with some teachings. he has posted some translations of rabbi kook’s works, and i would like to quote a huge chunk here:

“There are two ways of thinking about Godliness: One way is where we speak about ‘a Creator’ and ‘the Creation’, as if each was its own separate thing, nevertheless they are joined together in that the Creator animates the Creation and the Creation receives Life from the Creator.

The other way is where there is no existence of ‘Creation’ whatsoever, and the name ‘Creation’ is only borrowed from our side, i.e. we create our (separate) selves because of the constriction of our perception, but in truth, everything is ‘Creator’ – God – and thus everything is a different content that has no relation to (the first perspective of) partial revelation, because God is explicitly the Whole thing, not one part relating to other parts.

These two ways of thinking about God have a particular effect on the ‘spirit of man’. Logic and accounting come from the way of relating to the world, the Creation, as something other than God; but poetry and song and the soul’s longing come from the second way of thinking, where nothing exists except God, and God’s Glory fills all.

Mussar (being a moral ethical person) is a path that combines logic/accounting and poetry/song in the proper blend. If one power is lacking, it (Mussar) cannot stand. Therefore when we think according to the first way and differentiate between God and the world, we see a vision of God’s Righteousness, of the greatness of the Mussar that is revealed to us when we think about God, and the laws of this Mussar are filled with logic and accounting.

Then when the second way of thinking comes, and God’s Righteousness and full splendorous Mussar has already been established properly in the soul, poetry/song is strengthened by this higher, ecstatic perspective of ‘there is nothing else besides God’, and this adds fruits of blessing to the Mussar.

But, if the beginning of thought is only imprinted from the one side of ‘there is nothing else besides God’, we wouldn’t have a depiction of Mussar – in relation to Godliness – for this higher thought to act upon and bless, because we do not recognize moral values in the relation of one thing to itself, rather in its relation to others.

Even though the exalted height of the second thought is higher than the entire vision of the value of Mussar at all – as it is higher than all thoughts and limitations – in any event, a person cannot grasp a thought that is higher than his limited comprehension in its full majesty. And values of Mussar always have to be found where they are awakened and then ‘returned and awakened’ in all the Paths of Life – that is why terrible danger can spread from having the second thought overpower the first.

However, if the first thought – whose wings are clipped – overpowers the second, that could cause the spirit of man to sink, and by sinking, he could lose many delightful things. Therefore there is no other remedy except to think about (Godliness) in such a way that the first thought is always revealed as a ‘garment’ for the second thought which is higher than the first – Zeir Anpin (the small face of God) – is a ‘garment’ for Arich Anpin (the large face of God) – and YHWH is Elohim.”

this is the passage that finally linked up my buddhist studies with judaism. in short, kook is talking about two ways of thinking about g-d: dualistic & non-dualistic. the dualistic way is: there exists g-d & the universe created by g-d, subject & object. the non-dualistic way is: there is only g-d & nothing else. the most sublime point here is that these two views are not opposing each other. again, “Therefore there is no other remedy except to think about (Godliness) in such a way that the first thought is always revealed as a ‘garment’ for the second thought which is higher than the first.” kook does not speak about choosing either perspective. both are necessary. to balance them is the work.

note the terms “large face” & “small face.” zen master shunryu suzuki used the terms “big mind” & “small mind” to speak about non-dualistic & dualistic states of consciousness. this is the bridge that finally connected judaism & buddhism satisfactorily for me. to get a better sense of some of these ideas as they appear in zen, here’s a quote:

“Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” i.e., “positionless position,” where “not two” signals a negation of the stance that divides the whole into two parts, i.e., dualism, while “not one” designates a negation of this stance when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation, i.e., non-dualism. Free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism (i.e., neither “not one” nor “not two”).”

for kook, both dualism & non-dualism are necessary. neither must overpower the other. in zen, one must have “[f]ree, bilateral movement” between the two. in both cases, to choose dualism over non-dualism would be to set up yet another duality, so kook & zen describe a position of mind beyond both (or neither). the pursuit of this position of mind is why i consider myself both a religious person & a meditator.

——-

relatedly, i am reading “g-d in search of man” by heschel. here are some quotes & commentary:

“Lift up your eyes on high and see, Who created thee?

This does not reflect a process of thinking that is neatly arranged in the order of doubt first, and faith second; first the question, then the answer. It reflects a situation in which the mind stands face to face with the mystery rather than with its own concepts.”

in this section, heschel talks about how doubt doesn’t exist in biblical thinking. i was skeptical of that at first, until i read the above passage, which reminds me a whole lot of meditation. in day to day life, i find myself regularly paying more attention to my concepts of people & things vs. the people & things themselves. meditation is a lot about noticing this & shifting focus to the extant reality instead of my concepts about it. and doubt is precisely such a concept. if the biblical person takes up the practice of looking directly at the universe instead of at her or his own concepts of it, then i can see how doubt ceases to have a serious existence for such a person. i think of faith as a concept as well – obviously there is more to it than that. need to ponder more…

“Just as clairvoyants may see the future, the religious man comes to sense the present moment. And this is an extreme achievement. For the present is the presence of God. Things have a past and a future, but only God is pure presence.”

! no comment =).

i am having a grand old time in israel. everyone is friendly and hospitable.