Nonduality in Thought and Practice

Alone

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:11:21 -0400

If you were all there is
Not as many, but as one
Would you be alone?

I think it is only when
As one among many
We recognize that we are alone.

But that means, of course,
That we are not.

Yet, what is that bittersweetness
That floods the quiet moment
The time when our awkward protestations quiesce?

Is it not proof that we must be all?
All that there is
All that there may be?

Then aren't we alone?
What arms are there to embrace us?

Yet, I stretch out my arms to you
In the joy of knowing that you are here
Wanting to be joined into one.

Is that not proof that we must each be
Separate and alone in our needful silence
That we want so much to be held ourselves?

What is this thing that it is one
And yet two reaching out to the other?

Is this some dark torment
Holding in abeyance the joy that is there
To take and hold, to share and compare?

Or is it not the promise of bliss
The warmth of the other, the beat of another heart
The assuring pressure - skin against skin?

What more beautiful than this can there be?
What more astounding to accomplish?

I am all that there is, with no other
And yet I am not you, nor you I
And it is in this eachness that we can complete

That which we were when we started
That which we will be again.

Not alone in aloneness
Not together in one
Somehow, infinite in each other.

Copyright 2011, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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A Man with a Rock

Tue, 19 May 2009 14:36:27 -0400

One day as a man was walking along the beach, he noticed that there was a rock sticking out of the sand. It was an unusual looking rock. There was something about the way the light reflected off it. He could almost see things in it, although they were little more than slightly colored moving clouds of mysterious shapes reflecting off its surface. He got down close to the rock, so he could see it better, and the more he looked at the rock the more he could see. Or rather, the less he could see, because the longer he looked the more he realized that the rock had no color or texture itself. It seemed to pick up the colors and textures of things around it, although very badly indeed. He was so taken by this rock that he decided to dig it out of the sand and take it home with him. He thought about how impressed his friends would be when he showed them this rock. It delighted him to think that they would be similarly captivated by it. It would bring him new friends too, he thought, because no one had a rock like this one. The man began to dig. At first things went very quickly. The sand was easy to move aside and more of the rock was exposed. No matter how much of the rock he uncovered, it had exactly the same lack of texture and color when he looked at it very hard and for a long time. The rock only appeared to have a texture and color because it was reflecting the sand and the other things on the beach, the blue sky with fluffy white clouds, even the sun itself was reflected in that rock's surface.

After a while of digging the man began to get tired. There was much more of the rock exposed and yet he could not budge it from its place. It seemed to be impervious to any force. After a while the man began to notice the other things on the beach around him, especially the pretty girls walking by who would look at him shyly and smile. The man sat back and took in the sun on his face. It felt so good. The warmth flowed over his skin and he closed his eyes. Time passed.

Suddenly the man woke up with a start. He realized that he had drifted off to sleep. He looked around him and noticed the rock again. His determination to dig it out so that he could have it rose up once again in his mind. He got to work. Slowly, because now the sand was heavier, the rock's sides were exposed. But no matter how much of it was exposed he could neither budge it, nor see the end of it. The hole around the rock was beginning to get very large, and people were starting to come up to him in curiosity. They wanted to see what he was doing. "What do you think I am doing?" he said to their questions. Each of them thought he was doing exactly what they thought he was doing and that satisfied them. A few walked about thinking he was a crazy fool, some walked away thinking he had found an innocent way to while away his time, some just shook their heads and quickly forgot about him, and one or two went off to search for their own rocks to uncover.

The man worked like this for a very, very long time. His beard grew, but his fingernails stayed trim because of the friction from the sand. By now he had a large audience. Individuals came and went, but the crowd slowly grew. Then officials started to come down to the beach. Officials always go to where the people are, so they can officiate. Some individuals, convinced that they understood exactly what the man was doing, started to offer explanations to anyone who would listen. Some of them were very good at it. A few of them asked for donations to help support the man's work. Over the days and weeks the man's digging became a popular sight for anyone looking for a few moments diversion.

One day he stopped. He was exhausted and felt that he wasn't getting anywhere, although the hole was so large now that he could no longer see the beach and the crowd of people. All he could see was a round of sky and a wall of faces looking down at him. There was a loud murmur that he could now hear clearly because he had stopped scraping at the sand.

Suddenly a voice called out to him. "Don't stop! You're almost there." "What?" the man said, "I don't understand." "Oh, you are almost there. I estimate that you only have another two feet to dig before you find the bottom of that rock!" "How do you know that?" the man asked. "I am Doctor Smith from the University and I have a P-H-D (the man emphasized the letters) in the morphology of indigenous rocks in this area." "Oh" the man said hesitatingly. "I thought this was a special rock." "Oh it is!" said the doctor, "look at how big it is! It is definitely an unusual specimen. But given the morphology of rocks in this area, which I have studied at great length, you should only have another two feet to go!" "Or I'll eat my hat" he added. He didn't have a hat on though, the man thought to himself. He turned and looked at the rock. He realized that given the circumference of the rock, another two feet of digging would take him a fairly long time to finish. He hesitated. Again, suddenly, another voice rang out. This one sounded melodious, like a bird's call. It was a woman. "Silly man!" said the woman's voice, "why are you wasting your time with that rock?" "Why," he hesitated, "it's a special rock!" He heard her giggle, and his heart thumped strongly in his chest. He wasn't sure what that meant. "They're all special, silly!" "Why does she keep calling me silly?" he thought to himself. He was looking at her wondering what to say, when a sort of chant started up from the crowd. "Dig, dig" the crowd chanted. He looked at the man with the P-H-D who nodded his head as if to say, "yes, continue with your digging." The man turned to look at the woman with the birdsong voice. She was still smiling at him. He hesitated, not knowing what to do. The chant continued, "dig! dig!" Slowly the twinkle in her eyes (for there was a twinkle, which the man hadn't noticed at first) faded. Her smiling face relaxed and the smile slowly vanished. The man turned away and started to dig. After a short while, he looked over his shoulder to see if she was still there, but she wasn't. For some reason that bothered the man.

After another week, he had almost made it down another two feet. At least it felt like it. But all the man could see was the same rock, with the same cloudy reflections playing over its surface... well, he thought he could see cloudy reflections playing over its surface. Mostly though he just saw a rock. The man stopped. He expected to hear the man with the P-H-D again, but he had gone off to another part of the beach to lecture to a crowd of people about the morphology of the indigenous rocks in the area. The man looked over the circle of faces looking down at him, searching for the woman. He didn't see her, and for some reason that bothered him again. It made him feel even more tired. "I'm coming up" the man told the crowd. A great cry of indignation rose up from the crowd. "No!" they said, "you have to dig!" He looked up at them and asked "Why?" "What do you mean why?" someone shouted, "You are the one that started digging!" "Besides," another shouted, "the doctor from the university said you are almost there! You don't want to give up now, just before you accomplish what you set out to do, do you?" The man thought for a moment about what it was that he wanted to do. He looked at the rock and remembered that he wanted to take it home so he could show it off and get new friends. Then he looked up at the crowd and realized they were not his friends, nor would they ever be. They were only interested in what he was doing, because it gave them something to while away their own time with. And they didn't have to get their fingernails all scratched doing that! The man realized the emptiness of what he had been attempting to do, but he felt like it had accomplished something after all. Suddenly, the singsong voice called out again: "Well? are you still doing that silly digging?" The words sounded like a laugh... a beautiful laugh. The man's heart did that hard thump again. This time he did not hesitate, "No! he said, I'm coming up!"

It was a hard climb out of the hole he had dug, but finally the man was able to get out. The press of people in the crowd almost pushed him back down. People were touching his arms and slapping him on the shoulder, and shouting questions at him. He couldn't make out a thing anyone was saying to him, but he tried to answer: "yes, no, maybe, I don't know" he said, and each questioner chose the right answer for their own question and was satisfied. A loud voice yelled out: "Hey! somebody's digging again!" And the crowd suddenly turned away from him, back toward the hole where another man had taken his place and was furiously digging. He would glance up at the circle of faces looking directly at him and then turn back towards digging as if the faces had electrified his arms somehow. The original man looked around for the woman. She was right next to him. She spoke again, but he didn't hear what she was saying because he had suddenly caught the scent of her perfume and it overwhelmed him. His heart was thumping very strongly now and the mixture of thumps and perfume made him very dizzy. The woman took his hand and continued speaking to him. Slowly he started to make out what she was saying, but he had to listen very closely. His head felt like he was going to swoon. He focused with all his might on the woman's face. And then he noticed something.

The woman's face was reflecting all manner of things, like fluffy clouds of mysterious shapes, they were passing over her skin, which now that he noticed it, didn't seem to have a color or texture of its own. It was an amazing sight, and the man suddenly snapped out of his swoon when he realized where he had noticed that before. The woman had stopped talking and was smiling at him. She still held his hand. Slowly the woman pressed his hand, open palm first, between her breasts. He felt her own heart thumping. He looked at his hand and noticed that it too seemed to be reflecting things around it. He could see the shape of her breasts play across its surface. He looked up at the woman's eyes. They were smiling too. He heard her voice say, in the birdsong way, "Everything is special, you silly man!" It was like a laugh, the way she said it. He looked in her eyes, and suddenly understood. He could see the whole world reflected in those dark eyes. He slowly looked away so that he could see the beach lying around him, and the blue water with its brilliantly sparkling waves showing a million reflections of the sun. And the sand, each a tiny world, brilliantly reflecting the same sun and the millions of reflections of it coming off the water. The whole world was sparkling like a jewel. He felt the warmth of the sun on his face and turned towards it. The woman said something again. He thought she said: "and you complete me." He opened his eyes again and looked into hers. She moved his hand onto her breast and he could feel her nipple hard beneath her shirt. His hand tingled as if his nerves were suddenly shot through by electricity. The man thought of the rock on the beach and how it had seemed to reflect all manner of things around it. He felt the accumulated weight of its importance to him in the deadness of his limbs, and he smiled. Because now he understood.

Suddenly the man woke up with a start. He realized that he had drifted off to sleep. He looked around him and noticed the rock again protruding from the sand. This time, he turned away and searched with his eyes to find the woman on the beach.

Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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A Man Met Himself

Sun, 10 May 2009 10:05:18 -0400

It had been cold a very long time and
Rocks were covered by clear sheets of ice.

There was no pleasure in days such as this
And yet, there was…
For the cold made things sharper if one looked.

But that was the trick, one had to look
For it was in the looking that one finds the truth.

A man met himself going out of town and
This made him wary because it was not normal
To meet oneself like this.

The man paused and his self paused too
The two looked each upon the other.

At first he could not see any visible differences, yet
There must be differences that I cannot see
Each thought to himself.

The man asked his self who he was
And his self asked him the same.

What trickery is this? the man thought
He could see the brow on the other furrow in doubt
As if the other was a mime.

How can this be? the man questioned
His self questioned too.

The man looked for a very long time
Until he became anxious about his self’s intentions
Whether he meant to harm him.

This made him squirm a little and
That is when he noticed it was just his reflection in the ice.

Satisfied and having had enough of this
He hurled a “good day” to his self
As he hurried along his way.

As he passed, his self turned to follow
A smile crossed his face as he echoed “good day!”

Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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Ineffable Naturing is not Change

Mon, 2 Mar 2009 14:23:28 -0500

"The method of nature: who could ever analyze it? That rushing stream will not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature in a corner; never find the end of a thread; never tell where to set the first stone." Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Method of Nature”

I have been told that Charles Sanders Peirce took a ‘hard line’ by saying that the ineffable, the unreportable, is no principle of explanation; thus it can be no manifesting nature, nor an ‘otherwise’ such as Kant’s thing-in-itself. It occurs to me that we philosophers, sticking hard and fast to our dichotomies, are limited in being able to think outside of the box. The box in this case is the one that encloses the ontic. Anything 'outside' the box cannot possibly in any way have anything to do with what's 'inside' the box according to this way of thinking. I note with wry amusement that Science, although widely castigated for being inflexible in just this way, isn't so inflexible when it finds no other way to explain a phenomenon. They have created this 'stuff' called “dark energy” in order to save the appearance of the universe's expansion. They had to do so because their current theories, which work fine in all other cases, cannot account for the way in which the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Since the theories otherwise work, they say, there must be an energy source that permeates all of space, that is pushing the universe apart; yet, because we cannot see or remotely sense any such energy as that, it must be 'dark'. An inflexible philosopher would say no, no, no! can't have it! It either is or it is not!
It may be that Science is wrong in this idea. But its action in this conundrum is based upon the simple observation that something is happening that cannot be accounted for. I follow F. H. Bradley in this case, when he says something along the lines of: "I cannot accept that in looking at a thing I can know nothing of its nature." I view the world and I know it has a nature! My experience is nothing other than the realization of the unfolding of that nature before me (and as me, of course).
The way I see it, the dis-ontological and the ontological are aspects of a whole reality that is only distinguishable in thought. This whole is not a plurality (i.e. it is not many). It is sectile for thought because it is (a) flux. Now how can this be? I suggest that it is because this sectile whole is so because it is not a 'block', as William James accused Bradley of having at the heart of his philosophy, but rather is not many natured (my word: apollophysic). There are stands of Colorado Aspens consisting of hundreds of apparently separate trees all arising from the same root system, which is a good metaphor for this apollophysia. But nature is not a ‘thing’ when we distinguish the naturans (naturing) from the naturata (natured); distinguishing it in this way creates a humpty-dumpty paradox. In my understanding it is the naturing, so distinguished, that is dis-ontic (so not a thing; ineffable) and the natured, so distinguished, that is ontic. Yet note that the natured distinguished in this way has no nature anymore in our concepts! The natured is a blocky, static, thing among things. It is a concept only and is removed from reality which is ever-flowing. Yet, together in reality as a whole, they are "Nature" or "God". (The danger here is getting too caught up in Spinoza's thought, because he was too inflexible in his thinking about Nature. He had to account for the different forms of the natured by introducing another level of abstraction into the account, thus mind and body were different 'modes' of Nature. For me, Nature is indefinite, meaning free. I have no trouble thinking of God as being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, nor of Nature, which are two names for the same reality!)
Thus, the naturing is ineffable. Yet think about how we describe naturing. We call it change. But “change” means that there is a difference between what was and what is now. Thus what was is no longer. Yet this does not accord with my experience, certainly not of myself. There is a subject here that does not change, and so it is with the trees in my yard. This way of thinking of naturing as a sequence of changes is the zoetropic view of reality that I wrote about in my book, in which we set images in a sequence and move through them to create the illusion of movement; and I venture to say it is the view of reality that Zeno found to be wrong-headed since it introduces such paradoxes into even the simplest thing, like crossing a room. For instance, we do not know why a human fetus develops from a single cell into a human being, we only know how it does so. We know the discrete states it passes through and the biological entities involved, and we understand there is a flow from one state to the next. We even know that the states really aren't resting spots, that the unfolding is continuous. But we don't know how it is continuous. What we can describe is the arrested naturing, i.e the natured. We do not, to Zeno’s point, understand how to put the ‘continuous’ back into experience once we have chopped it up into changing things.
So, I find that I cannot agree with Pierce on this and feel he was too much a scientist in this regard. Science gives us the "how" of a thing, never the "why", unless we equate the “why” with the “how;” and it is specifically this shortcoming of outlook that led Pierce to emphatically state that the ineffable was no principle of explanation. In fact, nature is the only principle of explanation of the "why" of the world, ineffable though it be. I much prefer Peirce’s final thoughts, not long before his death, when he said: “pragmatism does not bestow a single smile upon beauty, upon moral virtue or upon abstract truth,—the three things that alone raise Humanity above Animality.” This way of looking at the world as changing things with no connection to Nature’s naturing is, above all else, pragmatic.

Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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Gods Guts

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 20:20:16 -0500

There are two ways to view our experiences, either as free-floating mental images or as images of real physical objects. These two are the full spectrum of possibility in most philosophers’ minds. They do not see any other possible way that experience can be happening. Note that both of these views make the content of experience "images". So in neither case are we experiencing actual reality, which we are separated from. Even our memories are images, although they are vague images and nowhere near the ‘image quality’ of the original experiences.
            If we think of the world as a physical reality separate from us, and made up of an infinite number of other separate things, we take these images to be adequate, but not completely accurate “representations” of what is really there.
            If we think that reality is nothing but ideas in a mind, whether our own mind, or the Mind of God, we think of the world as illusory because we take our experiences to be of false or misleading images.
            Because experience is a continuous ‘stream’ of all these images, we need a place to store them, like some library in our "head" (in other words in our brain), or in our mind, depending upon whether we believe that the world is real and separate from us or not. The first view, materialism, requires a brain to store the images. The second view, idealism, requires a mind to store or "have" the images.
            I am pointing out that both of these views are wrong because we are misunderstanding what experience is. There are no images being had and stored anywhere. And to see this, we have to become clear on what “understanding” is.
            The Understanding is non-individuated Awareness. Awareness doesn't exist in the world, it doesn’t experience the world, Awareness exists as the world. Awareness is the foundation upon which the entire world arises. What arises from this 'ground' of Awareness is the activity of Awareness, and I call this activity “knowing.” “Knowing” is a verb, just like the word "running" is; and just as someone who is a “runner” is so because they run and not because they once upon a time ran, Awareness knows by acting now – by manifesting the world. Therefore the knowledge that we seek, whether we are a scientist hoping to discover how a thing happens, or a spiritual seeker hoping to discover why it happens, is all around us, enveloping us, being us. It is the activity that we call our selves and the world (forget for the moment the problems that occur because we distinguish ourselves from the world and others in the world).
            So knowledge is not some content in something like a brain or a mind. Knowledge is the whole world. Not of the world... is the world. It is enactment – the activity we experience. It is all those little particles and awesome forces studied by physics, and the myriad forms that they take according to the laws of nature; in other words, the laws of the nature of the manifestations of Awareness.
            But there is more to this. The world is not an illusion in the sense that it is only a false image somehow conjured up in our mind. There are no images (I'll speak about sight in a minute). The world is illusory because we take it to be independently real (as we do in materialism), yet that is false because it is not independent of Awareness. The “running” is not independent of the “runner.” Nor is the "runner," as such, independent of the running – that is Buddhism's insight about the co-dependent origination of all things and it applies equally well here.
            The world exists. Not as an image in a mind or in a brain. It exists, and it is the 'process' of existing that Awareness knows.
            Plato spent a lot of time writing about what knowledge is and came to the conclusion that there was no way to adequately describe it. That's because he wanted it to be some kind of image of what is real, as we do.
            What is the most basic teaching of Advaita Vedanta? That conceptual knowledge is not the real 'thing'. I am saying that knowledge is the real thing, but knowledge is not an image, or about something else. Knowledge is the writhing flux of blood, sweat, tears, triumphs, truths, ignorance, and failures, that shows progressions and regressions, and like tides, is advancing, now slow, now fast, toward what I call the fullness of presence.
            So what about 'conceptual' knowledge? First, distinguish between the meaning of thoughts and thinking itself. Thinking itself takes place in the brain. It is the activity of Awareness, as is the rest of the world. And as I showed in my chapter on the spontaneous nature of thinking in An Introduction to Awareness, it arises as a manifestation of Awareness (so I disavow that these words are mine in an egoistic sense, I just liked them :)
            Now, what is the “meaning” of these thoughts? Their meaning is the affective response that we feel as they arise, because they somehow fit with the perspectival understanding that we are at that moment. They are not discordant with that moment, as if our lives were some long musical composition that we are performing. We feel when notes are mistimed or are discordant with the notes that came before and the ones that are just now coming to be. See how I am introducing meaning as what we mean when we ourselves say something or think something, and also as what we mean as we hear someone speak or read some writing. There is no objective meaning outside of us. The two meanings are hopefully coherent, or our meaning would be lost on our audience. And it is coherent because there is no separation between us.
            Finally, there is the purpose of concepts. They are completely practical. They are useful in helping us make our way in the world by finding edible berries and evading predators that might eat us. They help us find the products that we want in a market and to sell our wares. And they can help us to understand that which we notice about the world.
            We distinguish something, like my "feelings", and try to notice all that we can about them, while pushing the rest of the world into the background. It is such a useful skill, unless we forget what we did when we pushed the rest of the world into the background and come to think of "feelings" as a phenomenon that is separate from our very being as the world. Isn't this the heart of Advaitan teachings?
            I said I would also mention what 'seeing' is. We are so ingrained with the dualist understanding of reality that we assume that when we see something our physical organs somehow form an image of what they see. This just moves the problem of consciousness into the recesses of the brain – it doesn’t explain it.
            I see because light impinges on my retinas and signals are transmitted into my brain. Everyone agrees with that, even if they take it all to be an illusion. But my brain does not somehow form an image somewhere of what the retina saw. Instead, Awareness is the retinas, the optic nerves, the brain itself, and all that activity of molecules, ions, and blood flow, etc. are all the activity of Awareness.
            We are conscious of what we see because we are the physical equipment that is excited into movement by light impinging on the retina. Even the light is the activity of Awareness. There is no distinct thing somehow containing something else that represents something other. There is only the activity of Awareness. It's like our physical bodies are the guts of God.

Copyright 2009, James M. Corrigan, All Rights Reserved
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