Descartes' Maxim, Nisargadatta's Sadhana

 Descartes wrote ‘Cogito ergo sum’, I think therefore I am.  Nisargadatta stuck with ‘I AM’ with Being.  That sounds portentous but what did it entail:

My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!  

Very good, fine, splendid but how did he carry on his business ventures, his chain of tobacco shops, his family life?  You may as well ask how do animals which have comparatively little powers of intellection manage.  Rote, routine, stimulus/response, habit; all those powers which allow us to navigate  in life in a waking but unconscious state.  In fact I would assert that Nisargadatta’s intuition was enhanced by remaining in that state of immersion in being.  Out of that place comes our capacity for transformation and creative energy.  He writes in his masterwork ‘I AM THAT’:

 My Guru told me: "...Go back to that state of pure being, where the 'I am' is still in its purity before it got contaminated with 'this I am' or 'that I am.' Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all." My guru told me, "Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done." I did believe him and soon realized how wonderfully true and accurate were his words. I did not condition my mind by thinking, "I am God, I am wonderful, I am beyond." I simply followed his instruction, which was to focus the mind on pure being, "I am," and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the "I am" in my mind and soon the peace and joy and deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared—myself, my guru, the life I lived, the world around me. Only peace remained, and unfathomable silence. (I Am That, Dialogue 51, April 16, 1971).

Martin Heidegger whose ‘Being and Time’ I’m reading at the moment had a similar sense of the importance of being but he I think was overwhelmed by the other element of Descartes' maxim, thinking.  Rapt in that endless rumination he excogitated numerous overwrought expressions of the implications living in the neighborhood of Being brings.  

As I continue reading that baffling work in an agonistic engagement, so to speak, I will have more to say which will be very likely quite mistaken.

Leftovers show

 As I was saying about the connection between Atheism and Technism, Del Noce’s coinage for the fascination with gadget solutions to whatever ails you.  ‘Is there an app for that’?  As with the secret of Mont Saint Michel lurking at the bottom of a microscope even works of fiction, dramas, shows on tv have that belief that there is a final answer to be given by a sage scientist. This is evident in the rather, for the most part, excellent and imaginative show ‘The Leftovers’ put out by HBO in ‘14 - ‘17. 

The Leftovers

Its more than a riff on rapture. Heidegger might have been consulted for it, I jest. Much of it has an underlying theme of the ultimate precarity of life and how facing that anxiety can either destroy us or demand authenticity. ‘That’s a lie’ is a constant refrain being said by all the characters in the 3 season show. John Murphey will burn your house down for that. All that is good and we accept the symbolism, shamanistic travels to other worlds, the bureaucratization of sudden departure, the scamming angle, the cult of the Guilty Remnant that adopts smoking as remembering. All of that is brilliant, deep, metaphysically profound, obscure, and simple as death. Then however it goes awry in the third season when they bring in the scientific solution, let’s call it by its true name, a one way teleporter between the two worlds that of the leftovers and that of the departed. Really they ought have, like Iris Dement sings in the theme song of the second series, ‘Let the Mystery Be’. Live in Keatsian Negative Capability.

II had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare  possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.