What is Philosophy

 Philosophy is a disquisition on the obvious. Staring at the everyday until it becomes uncanny. How does consciousness stick to itself? I don’t have to pay any attention to it. There it is self shining, enveloping every moment as I-I. There is no need to fix your attention on it. It is simply there. Samadhi must be where consciousness becomes self fascinated but without a definite content. It somehow locks on to itself and rests. The cache is cleared. It’s the final rinse.

Agent and Patient

 There’s a spectrum from agent to patient.  In the ordinary way of thinking about it the agent confronted by a possible  action can do it, not do it, do it differently.  The patient is the one we have been discussing, the powerless one, the end stage junkie, the alcoholic, the gamblers enormous guy.  An insidious HAL is in charge of his ship and unless he is reborn he is doomed.  He has to pause the course that he has set.  That path to homeostasis that is his fix  must be laid aside before he can begin to remove the programs and Daisy can give him his answer.

The agent has his own set of rules, habits and behavioural loops.  They smooth the path to immediate response.  The centipede wondering which leg to move first fell over.  Freedom is a project even if its unattainable as an end state of a-causality.  The Vedantic sage dismisses the merely causal as an illusory end, just karma, nevertheless spiritual practice engenders peace or the tranquillity of order.  Now the big question - Who Am I - is possible.

aperçu

All the reading, turning over each spit of barely comprehended text and leaving it there to be broken up  by weathering.  Wisdom and Bergsonian intuition is like that.  You can’t think about it.  It just goes on at its own pace and the aperçus are sweet when they come in their season.

 

Cosmic Station

In Vedanta synchronic identity is the central question. Why is every state of consciousness saturated with selfhood. We don’t have to think about it, there it is, firm as an anvil. The -Kena Upanishad (ca.500 B.C.) asks in the opening statement which gives it its title kena - by what agent.

 

 “Willed by whom does the directed mind go towards its object? Being directed by whom does the vital force, that precedes all, proceed (towards its duty)? By whom is this speech willed that people utter? Who is the effulgent being that directs the eyes and the ears?” 

 

 This appears to be a version of a Cartesian theory of a director self behind the curtain but it is rather the opening of the typical progress of a dialectic in which each position is sublated in a higher synthesis. The immediacy of each state of consciousness, its self-effulgence, is the core of non-dual meditation. The mind body complex irradiated by consciousness is the source of our awareness of the world. Simply being what it is and embedded in the world allows native capacities to manifest. They do not exist as it were in the dark, a priori, waiting for a world and are not in any Platonic sense formal. 

 

 It occurred to me this morning that certain meditations on the cakras, yantra (mystic diagrams) and mantra can have a Kantian a priori effect, sort of, by being a background which organises all inputs both intellectual and sensory in a formal manner. The world reaches us on their wavelength. Is that what realisation is, being stuck on the same cosmic station?

Musing

Duration is your own personal gravity. It is enhanced by meditation which can turn half an hour into five minutes. That extra twenty five minutes which some might say was lost time is available for poetry. For mystics it can stand for a lifetime. Time passes through them.

pointing, mapping, and other mysteries

If every rose was an individual rose there would be no rose and each of them would have another name. But then there would be no naming of anything. The finger points at the moon but can we point at pointing. As in the childrens' card game of snap, images flow over each other and await congruence.Well, you may say, pointing, mapping, comparing are meta 'activities' supervenient on the data. True but can they be taught?

A response: It is not necessary to know what we are doing. 'Doing is the mother of doing' said Samuel Johnson. So that is what I was at. Comparison is one of the Pramanas or a valid means of knowledge that is underived. This is a scandal for the Empiricist.

Narrative

Johnson considered ‘narrate’ a word only used in Scotland.
Narrate (vb.narro, Latin) to relate, to tell; a word only used in Scotland.

Johnson offers a citation:

Consider whether the narrator be honest and faithful, as well as skilful, whether he hath no peculiar gain or profit by believing or reporting it. (Watt’s Logick)

Since Johnson’s time the word has become a fixture in the Anglosphere acting as verbal grout in its sententious Foucauldian form or as a genteelism for story. Prior to the 19th.Century it was not in general use. In Scottish law (S.O.D.): That part of a deed or document which narrates the relevant or essential facts.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as told to E.A. Poe abides by this stricture though we note that Poe advised that it be presented as fiction. It reads like a bad opium trip drawn up from the orlop of his unconscious.

In Ulysses Joyce limns the post colonial narrative

It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking glass of a servant

The mirror that is too damaged for the house ends up in the servant’s quarters, as a superseded distortion. The Irish fear the fate of Jim, the boy who was eaten by a lion (Belloc):

His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James's miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

Narrative in the psychological sense is like the framing of a suspect by police through constant interrogation and sleep deprivation. After a few days Gerry Conlon told them that his Auntie Annie Maguire ran a bomb factory. That lady had a non-ironic photo of Queen Elizabeth in her living room.

Likewise over generations through stories confirming and enhancing nascent prejudices a population can come to believe almost anything. Narrative in this sense is a useful concept. Narrativity as an indication of a meaningful life or one which its events are connected in an orderly and consistent fashion seems a subjective criterion.

The spatchcocking of ‘narrative’ is a bad rhetorical habit. Replace with parable, tale, story, legend etc where they fit.

Climacterics

Passing the Saturnine ratchet of the climacterics every seven years offers a safe vantage point for the review of what has gone before. It is as though you were a new person with an interest in that individual back then but without the immediacy of the shame. We regret that those we offended took offence but, ‘moving on’.

This is not a bad strategy for those who believe in using themselves lightly, saving psychological wear and tear, rack, wreck and ruin. Using the climacteric metaphor as applied to fruit we may daily pick ourselves from the tree of life (oh God) and ripen a little faster that the seven years span. Meditation is that setting aside to ripen and as we know being in the presence of riper fruit or what the Hindus call satsang, accelerates the ripening process. [I can keep this up indefinitely] Feel the remorse, remordere, agenbyte of inwyt; now when it can be an effective engine of rectification. Balancing that is the bliss of being accepted by divine love.

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
By T. S. Eliot

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Rumours of Reality

There’s a persistent philosophical rumour that there are different sorts of objects of varying saturation of reality. First among those is the unknown object which might be a Saxon hoard or a shilling under a rock. It’s there, the unknown unknown. That a thing could be an unknown object is a guarantee of its independent reality status. As a corollary there are those mental states that only come to exist in the moment that they are known. An emotion comes into existence as it is known and then after it has abated drops into the memory well. So they are not really objects but they are real as objects of awareness. Other items have a reality contingent on agreements, legal instruments and so on. There are wills, contracts, vows, promises that are eternal or temporary or transient; fragile or adamantine. They exist within the sphere of the commitment of the parties involved and are real enough but they have ‘no face before they were born’ as the Zenists say.

Why Bother?

You have a neat clean metaphysical theory with crisp edges, open to attack of course but defensible. You have spent a long time developing this to the degree that you identify with it and would feel bereft if it were shown to be mistaken. Apart from that what difference does it make, other than the sense of having solved a standard puzzle? You might imagine that a Realist would place the world in a different context to the Idealist and I suppose there is truth in that, whatever truth is. Should that give rise to a specifically different quality of experience? Could a scientific experiment be devised to test this? I think not. It’s just philosophy after all.

Present Perfect

Lack is a condition that we all know well.  It drives us.  We move towards fulfilment and strive to fill  the little gaps in our perfection.  The early adaptor knows the temporary satisfaction of the cutting edge until it again ;requires honing.  In my 'Dharma' post I offered the idea of the non-apprehension of existence (anupalabadhi) or our distance from the ideal represented by the saint or incarnation as being the engine of righteousness. If not that, what; 'having it all' or at least having more than you, sunshine.

Lackwit, lacksense, lacklustre, lack a lady, on we go singing low. The alternative of having a 'pattern' saint is paradoxical; at once an admission that there is a distance between us and them as well as immediate access. That section of eternity where they preside is also known as the present moment. For a while perfection supervenes.