Fatal but not serious

My deepening dive into conversation will continue for the foreseeable future. I’m still in the phase of learning where, the more I read and listen (explicitly to podcasts but also just to conversations in life in general) the more I discover that I don’t know. I’m definitely in the epoch of “study the masters” and “learn the state of the art.” But still, sometimes things snap into a clear relationship to things I already know.

On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions, you are not serious. Likewise, if you are trying to avoid something unpleasant inside of yourself, that is also not being serious. A great deal of our whole life is not serious. And society teaches you that. It teaches you not to be very serious – that there are all sorts of incoherent things, and there is nothing that can be done about it, and that you will only stir yourself up uselessly by being serious.

But in a dialogue you have to be serious. It is not a dialogue if you are not – not in the way I’m using the word. There is a story about Freud when he had cancer of the mouth. Somebody came up to him and wanted to talk to him about a point in psych-ology. The person said, “Perhaps I’d better not talk to you, because you’ve got this cancer which is very serious. You may not want to talk about this.” Freud’s answer was, “This cancer may be fatal, but it’s not serious.” And actually, of course, it was just a lot of cells growing. I think a great deal of what goes on in society could be described that way – that it may well be fatal, but it’s not serious.

Everything, everywhere, in every moment does not need to be serious. That’d be exhausting. But if there’s too little in my life that is serious, my behavior starts to polarize. Moments where others want to introduce some levity become to me strident and annoying. I’m finding there’s a balance—but that’s not quite the right word because I’ve not yet discovered how to actually balance this…

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Fragmentation

What if I don’t know how to take something apart? One option is to apply excessive force and break the thing open. That works, but obviously sacrifices the thing; this is particularly useless if I wanted to take something apart because I need to fix it, or understand it. Generally, the smash method always works, but is almost never useful.

Yet thought also goes wrong somehow, and produces destruction. This arises from a certain way of thinking, i.e., fragmentation. This is to break things up into bits, as if they were independent. It’s not merely making divisions, but it is breaking things up which are not really spearate. It’s like taking a watch and smashing it into fragments, rather than taking it apart and finding its parts. The parts are parts of a whole, but the fragments are just arbitrarily broken off from each other. Things which really fit, and belong together, are treated as if they do not. That’s one of the features of thought that’s going wrong.

I’m perpetually on a journey of self-awareness. I’m quite often applying my mind to understand things. This idea from Bohm about fragmentation, and in particular fragmentation being bad because it misses out on the relationships and inherent properties of the natural parts (in the sense of disassembled-watch parts versus smashed-watch bits). This idea of fragmentation is a warning against my running with the first way I manage to understand something; just because I’ve found one way to understand (smash) something into understandable pieces, doesn’t mean that’s the best way.

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Hic sunt dracones

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

David Bohm, quoted by Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan

Yesterday I mentioned the difficulty of writing, or even thinking, about spiritual realities without a set of symbols (like Christian iconography, or the elaborate tantric mythologies of Vajrayana Buddhism) that can provide a means for grasping the ungraspable, and the despair that can result from the loss of such a symbology. But there are – I hesitate to call them techniques – paths that undercut the whole ideational thing that symbols allow. To use examples from the two religious traditions I mentioned, the practice outlined in The Cloud of Unknowing, and the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dzogchen, both cut through Bohm’s circular paradox like Alexander’s sword through the Gordian knot. Sam Harris points this out neatly in Chapter 4 of Waking Up, in the context of the risks that may attend non-dual teachings without an accompanying discipline.

I’m all too clearly aware that an account like the one I published yesterday may, while intriguing, give the impression that whatever illumination I experienced came merely out of the blue. A commenter on Silent Assemblies, where I also published yesterday’s post, pointed out that others (he mentions the Quaker Isaac Penington in particular) may come to illumination “[a]fter a long period of seeking or contemplation, [when] there is a gradual loss of identity and sense of confusion, which can be very painful.” While out of the blue experiences may sometimes occur, (yesterday I mentioned Ramana Maharshi and Eckhart Tolle, who each, incidentally, had suffered deeply psychologically and spiritually, if without any preceding practice) I think Penington’s experience, and mine, may be more typical.

Once again, from a point of view deliberately outside of any religious tradition or language (though of course informed by their insights) I’d seriously recommend (re)reading Sam Harris’ Waking Up. I don’t know of a better introduction to this whole illumination thing than Harris’ book, especially since he, both here and online, carefully avoids recommending entering on the path of any religion, and “rejects the dichotomy between spirituality and rationality, … seek[ing] to define a middle path that preserves spirituality and science but does not involve religion.” (Wikipedia)

#contemplative #DavidBohm #illumination #practice #SamHarris