[MD] Static Patterns Rock!

[david buchanan]

This article even makes use of a "rock" as an example....

Quoted from The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2003, Vol. 35, No. 2


Suzuki, for his part, immediately saw the connection between James’s pure ex- perience and Zen, and introduced James’s writings to his teacher Kitaro Nishida. Nishida not only directly appropriated James’s analysis, but also his expression ‘‘pure experience’’ in seeking to translate the direct-experience satori upon which Zen is based. Suzuki, too, appropriated the phrase ‘‘pure experience’’ to define ‘‘this most fundamental experience . . . beyond differentiation’’ (Loy, 1998, p. 136).

Non-dualism was well established in the two strands that wove into Zen: Buddhism and Taoism. Buddhists distinguished between dualistic knowledge—(‘‘bifurcated knowing’’)—and non-dual knowledge (‘‘springing-up knowing’’). So, too, dualistic perception— (‘‘with bifurcated thought construction’’)—was contrasted with non-dual perception—(‘‘without bifurcated thought construction’’). And as for Taoism, Chuang Tzu claimed nondualism—‘‘when ‘self’ and ‘other’ lose their contrareity,’’—to be ‘‘the very essence of Tao’’ (Loy, 1998, p. 34).

James’s Koan
Common sense says that mind and matter are distinct. Common sense says that exterior material objects interact with interior consciousness, and that such objects can survive the extinction not only of the subjects who behold them, but of consciousness itself. But if the experience of sciousness is the ‘‘always ‘truth’’’ prime reality that James, in agreement with Zen, claims it to be (1904a, p. 1151), then consciousness is not of something (internalized), but as something (neither internalized nor externalized). Echoing the great Koan traditions of Zen, James delivers this world shattering wisdom in the form of a question:

How, if ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘object’’ were separated ‘‘by the whole diameter of being,’’ and had no attributes in common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and recognized material object, what part comes in through the sense-organs and what part comes ‘‘out of one’s own head’’? (1904a, p. 1154)

There is a useful distinction to be drawn between an object and a mere thought of an object. As James put it, ‘‘Mental knives may be sharp, but they won’t cut real wood’’ (1904a, p. 1155). Mere thoughts of objects are intangible, internal, and inconsequential. ‘‘Real’’ (by-contrast-to-merely-mental) objects are tangible, external, and consequential. Kicking a rock is one way to make the distinction between a mental and a ‘‘real’’ object. It is not, however, as Samuel Johnson believed, a way to establish the independent existence of objects themselves. For the touch of his foot on the rock, as James’s koan could have helped him understand, did not confirm a realm beyond perception. What part of the touch came in from the rock? What part came out of his own head?

If full attention, unimpeded by expectation and uninterrupted by emotional reaction, is given to the contact of foot-touching-rock, its external hard ‘‘objectness’’ is clearly realized to be an aspect of consciousness. There is no prime reality of matter. ‘‘‘Matter,’ as something behind [emphasis added] physical phenomena,’’ is merely a ‘‘postulate’’ of thought (James, 1890, p. 291).