[MD] Ironistic Metaphysics

[david buchanan]

SUNDAY, 9 AUGUST 2009
The mysticism of ordinary experienceMany of the books that mean a lot to me I came across by accident and not because I read reviews about them. In fact, books that are hailed by professional reviewers often disappoint me - I seem to inhabit another world than people who are paid to read and (and sometimes reflect on) books.
Breakfast at the Victory. The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience by James P. Carse I bought in October 1995 in San Francisco (I noted it on the first page of my copy); I remember that I found it in a box of books that were for sale. That Pico Iyer, Robert Pirsig and Dan Wakefield recommended it - as the book jacket states - surely contributed to my having a favourable look at it but the subtitle probably intrigued me even more because I've always felt that there was something special about ordinary experience.
Okay then, let me quote from this extraordinary book on the magic of ordinary experience:
The wild geese do not know where they are but they are not lost. Knowledge can lift the veil. It can also become the veil. "In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added," Lao Tsu declared. "In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped." This is not mere anti-intellectualism; it is a recognition of both the importance and the limitations of knowledge. Learn what you can, then learn how to leave your learning behind you for it can hide you from the ceaseless change in and around you. The great Tao "nourishes infinite worlds, yet it doesn't hold on to them." Only by releasing our attachment, can we, in Rumi's phrase, "find our place in placelessness."
As the Buddhists put it, we are all unaware Buddhas whose efforts to lift ourselves out of the ordinary hide our true nature from ourselves. The Buddhists echo Eckhart's point in the declaration that nirvana is samsara - the highest achievement of the spiritual life is within the full embrace of the ordinary. Like our striving elsewhere, attachment to a discipline is but our desire of the extraordinary. Our appetite for the big experience - sudden insight, dazzling vision, heart-stopping ecstasy - is what hides the true way from us. Therefore, we need a discipline that undoes our attachment to a discipline. Thus the meaning of the famous sutra, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."But, of course, we first need the Buddha to teach us this, to teach us that we are already there, on a road of our own.


Compare the blogger above with this passage from chapter 7 of ZAMM, just a few paragraphs after the sand-sorting metaphor...
> 
> "Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.
> What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.
> To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.
> There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask that question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. About the Buddha that exists independently of any analytic thought much has been said...some would say too much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its direction, virtually nothing has been said, and there are historic reasons for this. But history keeps happening, and it seems no harm and maybe some positive good to add to our historical heritage with some talk in this area of discourse.
> When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But what is less noticed in the arts...something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is."



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