Dependence Co-Arising into an Atomic Dawn and Big Mother’s Lap
Koan Experiences with Gary Snyder, and the Destruction of Hiroshoma and Mt. St. Helens
I Chose to Sit Still With Meaningless Words and Something Happened
Last week during the Wednesday night Chan (Zen) Koan meditation here in Oaxaca I experienced something extraordinary. It arose from within a still body and slow breath softly moving in to and out from my pelvic floor.
The experience began without any foreshadowing announcement or pronouncement. The dusk within which I was sitting was typical, as were the tings of the starting bowl’s rings. The clear and cool evening air was still and fresh and quickly darkening as it does at this latitude. Others may find it ‘extraordinary’ that anyone willingly chooses to sit as still as possible on a thick cushion on a wooden floor for thirty-five minutes. And within my breath I am to keep the intentional yet non-intentional contemplation of some obscure and impossible to understand collection of words that seem to have been translated by someone unaware that language, proper language, is that which establishes understanding and/or clears away confusion. All this while not-gripping tightly with the mind those gibberish words nor those pesky little inflight fly- and mosquito-like unwanted words buzzing around looking for blood. And, on top of that, I am to give to my body the space to breathe into it those contradictory and/or meaningless words as bodily experience.
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Clarity and Words? Wow, What a Great Idea! Why Hadn’t I Thought of That?
With some thought it is easy to look behind the façade that the idea of language’s ability to clarify is, of course, a rather gross debasement of the actual power of words. Language, and perhaps specifically the word, is more like the ability to expand ‘meaning’ into the confused, the contradictory, the conundrum and the curious than it is to create clarity. To what extent that has and does occur is likely unknown because, in general, while our life-experience is mostly rife with verbal contradictions and their consternations and complexities, they rest well within the un-written history of the un-victors. The limited scope of the verbal truths come to us from the victors. And they have been busy inculcating delusion as truth by constraining language. Convidiana in our time is a great example of how crazy powerful is the abuse of language because the medical and economic conquistadors are doing their best to constrict the meaning of language in a vain effort to steal to themselves the power of free words with controlled scientism narratives, cleverly crafted laws and edicts of various sorts, lies, and gaslighting. These all debase the power of language. After all, to paraphrase John 1 from the Bible “In the Beginning was the Word and after-word all was a confused marriage of ebullience and decomposition, effectively a dynamic Marriage of Heaven and Hell. And that was Good’.
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On the surface it is an easy error to perceive that what is being done by the convidiana language police is to create confusion with having simply abused the meaning of words. Whereas I now understand that the effectiveness of propaganda depends more on the enforced bullied constriction of a word’s meaning to disallow freedom of its effective/appropriate expression. And, that propaganda works most effectively when the constricted words come to mean their historical opposite as Orwell astutely and creatively described. This is important, although now I think that it is even more important, at least for the language police’s purposes, to restrict a word’s ability to be free to express itself living the zeitgeist within which it is a creative part.
In a sense the extensive discussions by people like Michael Stone and Stephen Batchelor or Thomas Merton are about looking to re-vitalise the power of Gautama’s and Jesus’s affirmations with words of Life by removing the religious shackles that have enervated their meaning by stopping their evolution and traumatically splitting them from the present moment. Walter Ong in his important book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word' alludes to this in his contrast between the rigidity of the written versus the oral word. And with his argument that writing changes consciousness. Harold Innes, the media ‘genius’ Marshall McLuhan’s professor, talks about this as well at a very deep level in his fascinating argument about the way that the technology of word dissemination constricts or expands a society’s ability to survive in time. See The Bias of Communication.
To believe that language clarifies more than it confuses displays the peculiar juvenile bias in ‘western’ philosophical tracts that have used ‘tonnage’ of words in tomes in order to fail to constrict the constructed meaning of even a single significant word. The tomes have not provided a clearly delineated and defined definition that has the inherent power to last even out from the precise moment of so-called definition let alone down time’s indigo stream. For an example of a defining tome of ‘tomic’ definitions, see ‘Martin Heidegger’s lauded, Being and Time | The Question of the Meaning of Being’. The second link is to a short, gentle and typically misplaced encomium of that book.
And somehow we of human composition do communicate despite the inherent tricky power of words. And when we are ‘given,’ eventually, the fruit of our efforts to understand beyond our beliefs and samskaras — and we accept the proffered gift that is a result of diligent effort — we discover that words, which perhaps began our leap beyond faith and built the required bridges to that unknown place of knowing, have become the barrier to understanding. Hence word-koans in the east, and word-tomes in the west. The former recognises that words are an uncontrollable dragon that are best approached quietly and to be sat with patiently to discover their power which is to move us to the experience of knowing that is beyond words. The latter creates giant bibles over which the articulate thinkers and leaders of thought strive to set into stone-blocks the dragon nature of words. With that intention they proceed to enervate themselves endlessly by striving for a literal truth that can be pinned down like Eeyore’s tail in his flank instead above his ass. Or if you are unlucky, actually in his ass instead of above it. The Irish philosopher Uberboyo wonderfully explores an example of the enervation of word-rules through Nietzsche’s observations on how it was words that bled out the life-energies of the Greek, Roman and Catholic empires. See ‘Exploring Nietzsche's Brutal Criticism of Christianity’.
So?! What Was The Koan I Contemplated In Mind And Body As Oaxaca Evening Turned To Night?
A monk asked ‘What is the body that lasts?'
Dalong replied, 'Flowers cover the mountains like brocade; The rivers run deep like indigo' (Oaxaca Zen).
Here’s another, fun, translation:
A monk said to Dalong, ‘The body will ultimately decompose; what is the indestructible Dharma body?’
Dalong answered, ‘Flowers cover the [mountains] like brocade. The vale lies deep in [indigo] shade’ (Blue Cliff Record§ #82, my slight edit.)
The Blue Cliff Record is one of the heart scriptures of Zen Buddhism. It is a thousand-year-old collection of stories, commentaries, and poetry from the classical age of Chan (Zen) in China. Although it is a massive tome, at its core are one hundred brief dialogues or cases (often known in English as koans). In these stories, we meet the ancient masters as they struggle with the paradox at the heart of Zen: how to teach spiritual awakening when spiritual awakening is nothing that can be taught [with words]? (My edit).
And As I Sat What Arose Was an Image of a Pair of Destructive Eruptions
The first came from a young man’s eloquent and subtle expression of anger at the man-made and deliberate creation, en masse, of an unnecessary and brutally expressed destruction — human, structure and nature. It has within it several extraordinarily powerful synchronicities around human hubris, and the profound reality that is the core of impermanence.
The day I first climbed Mt. St. Helens was August 13, 1945.
Spirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6 and the second dropped on Nagasaki August 9, photographs didn't appear in the Portland Oregonian until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of the paper pinned up:
photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted as saying "nothing will grow there again for seventy years." The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin moccasins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like,
"By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life" (Gary Snyder).
[As I was editing this the earth beneath me began to gently move, another Oaxaca small quake.]
What caught my ear when I first heard it, in part, read by Michael Stone (in his talk ‘Intimacy, Transmission & Awakening The 10 Oxherding Pictures (Pt 5 of 6) August 28, 2015’) and then subsequently read it fully, was that this poem perhaps epitomises the nature of impermanence. The American nuclear scientists were confident that ‘they had become death’ to paraphrase Oppenheimer’s citation from the Bhagavad-Gita, and were thus become god-like with their assurance that nothing would grow in the bombed cities for seventy years. Nope, wrong again. Their mind-filled hubris overestimated the anticipated permanence of the God-like atomic destruction and massively underestimated the resiliency of life on earth — including human life. Michael Stone comments in one of his talks that the Chernobyl atomic ‘disaster’ has resulted in a flowering of nature because the destructive nature of human nature has abandoned the area as uninhabitable. Exit, stage left! Where are the left overs?
And the youthful and passionate Gary Snyder vowed to fight the blinded and heartless cruelty he saw in the destructive power of cruel human intentions with pledging himself to ‘the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens’. Oops, not right either. Snyder made this vow before he did a deep dive into Buddhism in Japan. I wondered how he reacted or interacted with his vow with the occurrence of the natural destruction of the ‘permanent’ mountain? I found this reading of his from 2010 that refers to it. Unfortunately it cuts off before the end of the talk. And Snyder wrote about that and more in a 2004 book Danger on Peaks: Poems, which I’ll go and look for after writing this. (For the curious, here is an in depth look at Snyder and Danger on Peaks: Poems by Joel Weishaus.)
I Am Human And I Am of Nature no Less Than Brocades of Flowers and Plumes of Ash are of Nature.
Par 289 … Personality is the supreme realisation of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. To educate a person to this seems to me no light matter. It is surely the hardest task the modern mind has set itself. And it is dangerous too, dangerous to a degree that Schiller never imagined, though his prophetic insight made him the first to venture upon these problems. It is as dangerous as the bold and hazardous undertaking of nature to let women bear children. Would it not be sacrilege, a Promethean or even Luciferian act of presumption, if a superhuman ventured to grow an homunculus in a bottle and then found it sprouting into a Golem? And yet that person would not be doing anything that nature does not do every day. There is no human horror or fairground freak that has not lain in the womb of a loving mother. As the sun shines upon the just and the unjust, and as women who bear and give suck tend God's children and the devil's brood with equal compassion, unconcerned about the possible consequences, so we are part and parcel of this amazing nature, and, like it, carry within us the seeds of the unpredictable.
Par 290 Our personality develops in the course of our life from germs that are hard or impossible to discern, and it is only our deeds that reveal who we are. We are like the sun, which nourishes the life of the earth and brings forth every kind of strange, wonderful, and evil thing; we are like the mothers who bear in their wombs untold happiness and suffering. At first we do not know what deeds or misdeeds, what destiny, what good and evil we have in us, and only the autumn can show what the spring has engendered, only in the evening will it be seen what the morning began (Jung, C.G. "The Development of Personality," CW 17, par 289-90, slightly edited.)
I Was Sitting, Something Happened, My Body Spoke to Me, Wordlessly Maybe from Gautama
If I had considered writing the above sentence even a few months ago I would have laughed at myself likely harder than you might be laughing now reading this. How dare I consider that the sacred cow of Buddhism might have spoken to me? Is it possible? I have no idea.
Something happened that created wordless understanding that lifted me. Not levitation! The roots of that awareness likely began years ago. On Wednesday I sat with a very nearly straight back for the first time in my life. And without a hint of stress or pain, also for the first time in my life. I was at peace and the breathing was easy.
And when the horrific images of destruction arose into this mind-body Guy-thing feeling more at ease and peace than ever before, and then passed through without comment from me, there was a ripple or earth wave that moved against experience and expectation and instead of creating a rift something fell together. Without intention of mind a split that I didn’t know was there was no longer there. The fit was perfect and the sound of it was as of something fitting with exquisite precision. No scar remained to remind me of what I hadn’t noticed before it went.
And the one half of the fit was my somatic discovery of Gautama’s own discovery and awareness of Dependent Co-Arising or Dependent Origination or Dependent Arising. And now, with time, that experience has been given several other names: Co-Dependent Origination or Causal Interdependence or Interdependent Co-Arising or Dependent Co-Orignation. Thich Nhat Hahn’s version is the simple Interdependence.
What Was it In ‘Particle’ That Had Me Spinning Up and Down Like an Excited Electron?
What I didn’t see included in this list was my first deep exploration of this idea that hides under the rubric Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
The HUP describes how the behaviour of sub-atomic particles are interdependent: measuring an arbitrary particle’s position accurately disallows measuring the energy it carries at the time of measurement. And, vice versa. This was a problem for the Newtonian/Descartian ideas and their faith in the hard reality of an objective Universe: the viewer ‘disturbed’ the viewed in a way that negated objectivity and upset the objectivists and was part of the ideology that helped birth scientism. In a nutshell, HUP is physic’s mathematical restatement of Gautama’s meditative ‘discovery’ 2500 years ago.
Einstein was very upset at this, which was encapsulated in his famous phrase ‘God does not play dice’. He spent the balance of his brilliant career thinking how to outface the dicey-ness of Nature. In the 1980s, with the newest high energy particle accelerators at the time, so-called scientific proof confirmed Heisenberg’s Principle and Einstein likely turned turtle in his grave.
At the time I realised that the broader implication of this ‘proof’ of interdependence is that every particle is aware, in a way we do not understand, of every other particle in the Universe! Now that is interdependence.
Heisenberg Becomes Somatic and the Rest is Semantic
On the atypical Wednesday of last week that mind-centric awareness of particle awareness, aka the faith or belief that is dependent on knowledge having come to me from outside of my Self through the words of others into my mind, was completely displaced by my body finally being able to share into my conscious awareness its absolute awareness of its living experience of Dependent Co-Arising. Faith and belief are gone. Dependent Co-Arising aka The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and its implied particle interdependence are alive as the expression of my being physical in this form of existence. Even if it is resting in some dimension of a multi-dimensional Universe or even as a dream that I am bound to wake up from at some point, perhaps with or without memory or discontinuities and inexplicable time shifts.
What has this to do with the impermanence and/or a koan about a monk avoiding a direct answer to human mortality and a so-called Dhamma/Dharma Body? (Dhamma and Dharma refer to the same idea of the true path. Dhamma is the Pali language and Dharma the Sanskrit). Something about the koan on that day opened a door and healed a rift at the same time. Since late last year, and with considerable acceleration this year, my yoga practices with a deep honour of the ethical practices of the Yamas and Niyamas and a strong somatic focus have been creating stronger and stronger body-grounded awareness experiences that manifest without words and are difficult to describe. This particular one on Wednesday had a profound effect on my energy as expressed in the actually feeling of joyful energy moving through my body, as well as increased freedom, strength, resiliency and endurance in mind and body. A truly remarkable feeling. If there is to be one adjective perhaps it would be energised-freedom.
And since this was a psyche-somatic gate that opened towards increased personal agency and freedom I will continue my practices to see where somatic freedom takes me. I have become increasingly aware that the more I embrace the responsibility of being the integrated natural human expression of mind-body-spirit here and now the more expanded becomes my joy and freedom because expanded responsibility is expanded awareness. Of course, this human nature has come with the human-given option to choose laziness and with it expanding suffering. It is wonderful to know in my body that to choose responsibility reduces suffering, my own and others.
And it is a wonderful surprise that as I have continued to experience these somatic changes that have provided liberation and energy, I find that like an old odd uncle I had dismissed as irrelevant and misguided has become a great teacher and source of expanded awareness. I now feel that Gautama is like this great uncle, or kindred spirit, whose words and teachings in the last two years have had a particular acuity this last year. I find myself joyfully wrestling with him as I now can see past the false Buddhist front that was built around him and see him as living with struggle and humour with life-experience wisdom that is constantly poking at and stretching my own while I continue to fumble around like a someone looking for candles after the lights went out.
A Closing Thought
As I was beginning to wrap this up I had the awareness of a peculiar synchronicity with my looking at the founding of the Church of Catholicism and its derivatives. (See my previous essays:
The Gospel of Thomas and Blinking Awake From My Personal Dogmatism's Daimon
When Gautama Woke Up Was His First Thought ‘OMG, Where Am I Now?’ Or ‘Who Are You, Really?
The gaslighting was to fixate permanence on the impermanent. This fixation on making the impermanent fixed, in body and on words through the apostolic tradition of word prisons, is a core narcissistic trauma that has fired up the engines of obedience to authority. Something to think about and perhaps I’ll explore more later.
Thank you for reading.
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†Closing Comment Poem From: Song of Myself By Walt Whitman 50 There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me. Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes, I sleep—I sleep long. I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is Happiness. 51 The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Listener up there! what have you to confide to me? Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening, (Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.) Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab. Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper? Who wishes to walk with me? Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
Song of the Essay
It's a good time far bankers and winners and sailors With their stories of jackpots and islands of pleasure They keep their treasures locked in Iron Mountain Locked in Iron mountain They're sailing through this transitory life They're moving through this transitory life It takes a Iong time far a mouse to realize he's in a trap But once he does, something inside him never stops trembling And grandma in the pancake makeup she never wore in life Lies there in her shiny black coffin looks just like a piano She made herself a bed inside my ear She made herself a bed inside my ear And every night I hear We're sailing through this transitory life We're moving through this transitory life When the doctor says: congratulations, it's a boy! Where do aII the dream baby girls, those possible pearls, go? Lorrine and Susan with the brown eyes And lovely Irene and difficult but beautiful Betty And tiny tiny Juanita? They're sailing through this transitory life They're moving through this transitory life Afraid to breathe, afraid to rise We run and run in this transitory life Tipped off balance we fall like Iight We land on water in this transitory life We fall like light on water and water turns to ice Everything keeps changing in this transitory life Everything keeps changing in this transitory life
Okay. For some strange reason my heart is so heavy and sad. I see your kindness as it shines through to me here in SS messaging. You have taken time for me. A complete stranger. Oddly this brings me to such a sad solitude. So I turn on your Youtube playlist and I feel like you are right here when I needed/need someone teal today. This pure moment. I am just sitting in it. Like a bright sunshine. What did I do to inspire you to reach your bright light towards me????????
Awesome work. Hard to explain why but I laughed suddenly at many points. The desire to harness the atom instead of enjoy it is lunacy 😊. As long as we rationalize violence we are less than the animals who at least have the intelligence not to rationalize anything. More apropos would be “I am become idiot”.