Just This Is It. What Is This? Pt 2
Just This Is It. What Is This? Pt 2
Rings In Our Noses and Introducing ‘The Chomsky Affect’ and ‘The Chomsky Paradox’
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Just This Is It (Abbreviated) Reprise With Slight Change of Focus
When [ninth century Chan (Japanese Zen) disciple] Dongshan [Japanese Dōgen] was ready to permanently leave his teacher Yunyan, Dongshan asked, “Later on, if someone asks me if I can depict your reality, or your teaching, how shall I reply?”
Yunyan paused, and then said, “Just this is it.”
Dongashan left Yunyan, perplexed. On his path he crossed a stream and saw his reflection in the water. Seeing himself he stopped. With awareness he wrote:
Just don’t seek from others or you’ll be far estranged from yourself. Now I go on alone, and now, everywhere I meet it. It now is me; I now am not it. When one understands it this way, then one merges with it-ness. —“Beyond Belief II” by Jeff Kōgen Seul (slightly edited with my emphasis. Michael Stone gives a good talk: ’Just This Is It’, with a lovely poem by Shunryu Suzuki.)
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Road to Nowhere In A Landscape Without Paths
Now where was I? Where am I? Meandering on a road to nowhere in a land without a path, lost and confused, seeking the signpost that unequivocally points to the truth I believe is singularly hiding in front of my eyes and for all seekers to hang out in, hippy clothes and rings in noses. It is in plain sight and yet I don’t see it because, maybe like the fool with a skyward looking gaze, I see the clouds coursing by and mistake that perception as power because by happenstance a cloud had on this day obscured the sun and sheltered the dog yapping unheard at my heels.
With my head held high, high in the heady clouds of too many books and full of questions and sighs, even some of those longed for oohs and ahas of temporary relief, I, the fool ignorant of my foolishness, find some great other floating in the sky in front of me. It isn’t quite close enough to touch. I embrace my great intangible discovery as new God or Goddess, Devil or Saint, Buddha or Mara. Satiated with delusion I think that I know what the differences between them are at this time, and I think that my anxiety eases.
What Is This?
When the [3 month] retreat began and I started meditating in earnest on the question "What is this?" my mind insisted on coming up with clever answers. Each time I tried to discuss my latest theory with Kusan Sunim, he would listen patiently for a while, then give a short laugh and say: "Bopchon [my Korean name]. Do you know what it is? No? Then go back and sit."
Irrespective of how suitably enigmatic they seemed, my answers were either trite or predictable. After a while, I simply gave up trying to find an answer. "What is this?" is an impossible question: it is designed to short-circuit the brain's answer-giving habit and leave you in a state of serene puzzlement. This doubt, or "perplexity" as I preferred to call it, then slowly starts to infuse one's consciousness as a whole. Rather than struggling with the words of the question, one settles into a mood of quiet focused astonishment, in which one simply waits and listens in the pregnant silence that follows the fading of the words (p64 Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Batchelor).
Nadine Shah - Runaway
Being the Ox, in the Oxherding Picture V
I didn’t see that I had a nose-ring in my nose and, from it, I had attached the slim string required to become an orderly follower of another’s truth. So much sweet repose lies in that false freedom of walking their paths of beauty that it was with bliss that I embraced having my own confusions overwhelmed by theirs. The confusions aren’t gone, of course. They stay safe and sound, hiding comfortably in the shadows cast by the brilliance of the other’s pretty truth-lights. I am now on the path, and it feels good. I am sure that I can count on it.
And it is with relief that what I’m free to question has been reduced from everything to a something beautifully packaged and constrained, with enough moving parts to distract me with a cleverly numbered and numbed truth. I am like the bull being directed by a tiny hand that pulls the thin red line that is attached to my nose-ring. And as was the case with my obesity, it is serving me very well, and so I am completely blind to it.
To Be or Be Not the Herded Ox: Text to Accompany The Ox Herded Picture V, my adaptation:
When their thought moves, I am sure to follow even as I foolishly pull away. Then another – an endless train of thoughts yank at my nose-ring. Where am I to look? Do I dare feel that pull? Whence is the promised awakening? Through letting go of all resistance I turn into their truth. But what’s that, there, out of sight in a swamp or dark forest? Is that a sound I hear a sound, a mellifluous call from another truth-siren’s throat that is asserting itself? Confusion arises and after a struggle, doubt prevails and I feel their truth tugging my nose. Their truth oppresses me not because they are objects of golden truth, but because of my self-deceiving mind. I stop and they strain to grip more tightly the nose-string noose. They hold it with strength in order to disallow all vacillation. The nose ring is firm. Where is the knife that will cut the string? (‘Oxherding Picture V’, Original text by DT Suzuki.)
Where’s the Knife? That’s The Rube. I Mean, That’s The Rub! How to Walk Like a Man?
When I was obese for several years, I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it because its existence wasn’t me. It was supporting me, as described in
The obesity left me, really without effort, once my psycho-somatic need for it fell away. How did that happen? Where did the need for obesity’s support go?
Keeping to the ox allegory, the string was cut. Or, likely, the nose ring fell away. Well, more truthfully, that nose-ring had been jerked out of me with mind-exploding pain. Mind numbing distress and a confusion so intense that it was a trauma that I didn’t even know had happened at the time it happened. I didn’t begin to experience the trauma until about six months later, during an afternoon in December while relaxing into painting my master’s bedroom. For several perfectly ‘logical’ reasons I slept in the lesser-than’s room.
I love painting and on that day I chose to listen to ‘Tunnel of Love’ by Bruce Springsteen on cassette played in my wonderful Sony Sportsman.
I was going to be 49 years old in about six weeks.
Five months earlier, in that summer, my ex had written a black letter so black it absorbed all sunlight. Penning the black letter had been triggered in her by a seemingly unbelievably trivial public exchange I and several other friends of mine witnessed. One of my friends asked her to relax as we were adjusting our seating for Italian food in a tiny wonderful Italian coffee shop and deli before we went to see some live Shakespeare. At the time the ex didn’t show how that suggestion had triggered her. I saw it the next afternoon in black and white.
At the time of the epistle it was not I that initiated the removal of the nose-ring. At the time I had long since forgotten its presence, if ever I had properly known it was there or had understood what it was if I did. The event of that unanesthetised extraction was an unforeseen and premature death that life had, in the shape of an angry partner and her written words, thrust me into.
And yet, I didn’t die. Physically. And it took me six months before I cried, alone in a room where I was not welcome, painting white the walls of my own unseen prison, mourning for a death of which I was still ignorant. Confusion. Some have argued that confusion is the beginning of wisdom. Perhaps in time. At the time it was for me the beginning of weight loss without going on a diet. And at the time I was completely unconscious of why I was steadily, gradually, losing weight as the following year progressed. Something had shifted and had left me. One of the nose-rings, maybe the biggest, that of extreme co-dependency, was gone. All that was left, were its scars which I would see slowly healed in the following years.
How Did I Get Here? Oh No, No, No! Not A New Life!
Wholly unprepared… we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve as before. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie (par 114 CW Vol 7 Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche by C. G. Jung).
With the big nose-ring gone and its scars in the initial processes of healing, the other lesser nose-rings began to make themselves felt. The previous thirty-plus years of steady, diligent and deep study and exercises in practical psychology, self help and Taoism began to take effect in my state of mind and bodily health.
Dammapada, The Buddha's Path of Wisdom
Chapter I: The Twin-Verses
1 All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
2 All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him. (Dammapada.)
With that change of mind not only was obesity falling away. The tentative blog I had begun in 2008 began to blossom in 2011. I began to free my creativity and imagination as I began to remove the smaller nose-rings and discovered, with great surprise, that I loved to blog. And I migrated my synchronicity journal from paper books onto the blog. That allowed for a wonderful explosion of creativity and seemed to help feed and expand the number and complexity and often humorous nature of these life-affirming magical expressions. I called them fushigis in the manner of the inspirational and amazing psychologist David K. Reynolds and the practice of Constructive Living. Reynolds and Constructive Living had a huge impact on my quality of mind and life. (My last blog post: ‘2016.02.10 — A Poem and Some Life-Changing fushigis’.)
Freedom
Freedom is only possible when limits are recognised, self-disciplined skills are developed, and the immediate circumstance is utilised with full attention. Some Westerners seem to think of freedom as an amorphous state beyond limits, beyond discipline, beyond circumstances. Such impulsive, random, irresponsible behaviour is not characteristic of freedom but of immaturity and meaninglessness. The artificial freedom is not worth the investment of our thought or action (p37 Playing Ball on Running Water: The Japanese Way to Building a Better Life by David K. Reynolds.)
Where are the Poems? There Must Have Been Poems — And Some Other Stuff, Too
I had begun to steadily write poetry and short stories. I was invited to join a small closed group of highly respected and oft published poets where I found myself and my aesthetic respected by them. Here are a few poems published on-line: ‘Featured Poet No. 50’. And I had two Haiku published in an actual physical anthology. Yes, at the time this teeny tiny small accomplishment marked a real turning point in my healing.
In January 2014 I began yoga and on my second class I had a central core epiphany: where I was stiff and sore in my body was where I had stored a lifetime of unexpressed fear and anger. Shortly after that I began a daily practice that has continued to date. The tiny, sometimes unseen or unfelt changes the daily practice engenders in the mind-body complex are proof to me of the power and importance of daily practice. It is not simply a belief I’ve read and stored in my head.
For me it really was the small things that, with daily effort, began to remove the scars of childhood traumas and the deeper scars of the co-dependency nose-ring that had enmeshed me with my ex. I began to find some sense of worthiness as my creative efforts were being respected by respected peers. My body was no longer obese and daily yoga and meditation were proving to be exactly as they are promised to be: life giving and life saving.
And although I was not yet walking like an adult male, no longer was I the person not worthy enough to carry anyone’s luggage. And I had stopped giving away my authority and agency by ceasing all blaming and complaining.
In this way the nose-ring generators of anger, frustration, blame, complain and worthlessness were steadily diminishing in number and energy.
What Does All This Have to Do With Noam Chomsky, the Uninjected Covid Camp Advocate?
On the surface Chomsky’s advocacy of food-less camps for the uninjected appears to be a 180° turncoat about face. Many castigated him for his hypocritical betrayal of freedom for the necessity of medical tyranny. It turns out that he wasn’t being hypocritical at all. For more on that see my previous essays Blinded by Our Truth (Pt 1): Delusion Knows No Bounds and is Always the Other Person’s Problem: and Part 2.
Huh? What does that have to do with me?
In the 1980s it became obvious that the corporate media peddled careful and egregious lies to achieve, typically, some kind of political agenda that benefitted their corporate owners. And I began to more carefully monitor pre-covid news craziness and even engage with the creators of some of the more egregious ‘critical’ stories. Eventually my nose took me into the sweet perfume of Chomsky political and power critiques. So beautifully, so much more than my ability, knowledge and time allowed me to do. And thus I put a nose ring into myself and gave the string to my hero Noam. And, it turns out, that many many others had put a Chomsky nose-ring into their noses too, by the level of durm und strang created by their perception of his hypocrisy.
I have come to see that there are three parts to this, i.e. three nose-rings.
The first nose-ring is that we were born and live in an extreme authoritarian bully culture. Of course we don’t call it that, and many don’t see it, because it is our basic cultural construct. Which is one of the reason we glorify and exalt our freedoms and often virtue signal those freedoms by bullying the disobedient. Woke is one of the best examples of that right now because their standards now include bullying people, often with open and openly praised assaults on freedom of speech, association and parental rights. See my essays ‘Obedience to Authority’ for more details about that and its genesis and manifestation. Our culturally implanted nose-ring is to obey the authoritarian bully and to bully the disobedient because collectively we are suffering from bully Stockholm Syndrome. And thus we are blind to that nose-ring and deny it in our collective despite all evidence, And we deny that it has its roots in the authoritarian structures of our religious ‘institutions.’ (See
As I showed in the ‘Blinded by our Truth’ essay, Chomsky is a critic only of illegitimate authority. His justification for proper authority structures are his nose-ring, one that is well hidden beneath his volumes of detailed abuses of power. He is blind to the obvious problem of how a so-called legitimate implementation of tyranny can be rolled back. He kind of waves his hand at it and suggests that we all have the ability to question the legitimacy of power. The time of covid has pretty much undermined his stand, as the illegitimate medical authority is slow to give it up, and ‘intellectuals’ like Chomsky are defending its implementation and structure, a structure it is loathe to give back. So we have been blessed to be living in the time that that experiment is being done. That’s part two, the 2nd nose-ring: making into heroes people who are powerful critics of authoritarian power who actually believe in the same power structure they are criticising.
Third nose-ring. Between the early 1990s and mid 2010s I studied and read Chomsky diligently and closely. He made the crazy world of media lying and abuse of corporate-government-military power complex clear and understandable. Greed is more stupefying than sex, money is power and when unbalanced, i.e. tyrannical, power will corrupt itself. I even watched, likely three times, the documentary ‘Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media’ in which he affirmed his belief that there are times when tyranny is legitimate. And I didn’t hear or see him say that. Why not? Because like Chomsky I had the authority nose-ring deeply imbedded for so long I didn’t know it was there. In other words, I was also a bully and didn’t see the hidden bully language in critics like Chomsky, Jordan Peterson, Naomi Klein and many others.
After these considerations on the nature of human blindness to power, I realised that this form of blindness applies more broadly. And with that I have developed a language to describe it. It is possible, even likely, that this has been articulated by others elsewhere in place and time given that there is really nothing new, except gadgets and tools, under the sun. Given that disclaimer here are:
1) The Chomsky Paradox: the overt disbelief and active criticism of the validity of authoritarian power structures while having the concomitant covert or unconscious belief in the same or a similar power structure under certain conditions, or as the means to temper the invalid power structure.
2) The Chomsky Affect. To be blind to someone else’s hypocrisy because that same hypocrisy resides inside us, especially when that someone else is highly praised for being clear-sighted and honest. This is a double-blindness that will create echo chambers and feedback loops, as we have seen revealed by the covid-rationalised medical tyranny that was rolled out and supported overtly or by silence by the so-called heroic critics of tyranny. It is particularly appropriate around social power structures. “Popular”, or perhaps more accurately, noteworthy examples of that are, of course Jordan Peterson, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky.
One is to have or inculcate highly developed senses and a great sense of humility and dedication to doing what’s right in order to start discerning which thoughts are one’s own, and which ones are imposed from the outside from
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And the closing song of the essay Röyskopp What Else Is There?
Lyrics to “What Else Is There?”
It was me on that road But you couldn't see me Too many lights out, but nowhere near here It was me on that road Still you couldn't see me And then flashlights and explosions Roads end getting nearer We cover distance but not together I am the storm and I am the wonder And the flashlights, nightmares And sudden explosions I don't know what more to ask for I was given just one wish It's about you and the sun A morning run The story of my maker What I have and what I ache for I've got a golden ear I cut and I spear What else is there? Roads end getting nearer We cover distance still not together If I am the storm, if I am the wonder Will I have flashlights, nightmares And sudden explosions There's no room where I can go and You've got secrets too I don't know what more to ask for I was given just one wish
Glad I found your writing. Having been practicing Soto Zen for a good time now, even building a Zendo in our garden. Then experiencing the institutions of Zen falling for the c19 Caper. Going full vax mandate. Very disenchanting. So was I idealising "the practice" as they say? Brad Warner was one of the few Zen Priests challenging this collapse into conformity. "Don't know mind". Being one of those treasured orientations for practice. My riff on that is..." Don't know mind, don't know what it don't know". Which leads us to St Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klien. (Currently reading Doppelganger 'doppelspeak' what an annoying book). I guess the house is divided on these betrayals. The nose ring metaphor is less comfortable, it gives some mitigation for those who seemed to turn against "us". Whoever 'we' are. And I have grow up too, my don't know mind don't know what it don't know. I can do pointy finger, nose ring bullshit, myself and complain about so called wise sages falling for the Hoax. And sitting Zazen can only slowly dissolve this. If your lucky enough not to be sitting zazen in an institution captured by a cult. But then again Dogen says zazen is enlightenment. In fact delusion is enlightenment. Damn.....sorry long reflection...thanks John
First, I salute you for your candid bravery. I think your Eastern knowledge and practices are to be thanked for it. Your Western upbringing thwarted it.
For these past four essays I had to break away to do a bit of research and pondering. (So, I am a good bit behind.) I read the Bhagavad Gita and I am half way through the Upanishads (Eknath Easwaran, translator for both). This brought insight and understanding to what you have been writing. The concept of the all-pervading Self is easy to grasp, but reaching that level of awareness isn’t.
As an understanding example, where you write: “What has happened with my physical practice much more so than from my reading habits is that fear has fallen from me and remarkable as that is even more remarkable has been that my curiosity and openness to the absolute mystery of what is has expanded. And with that expansion the fear-based need to know the truth has fallen away. This IS It has become enough because what it is is joyful curiosity about what this is.” (Just This Is It. What Is This? Pt 1)
In the light of my readings this makes much more sense to me.
Your assessment of Chomsky was very good. I have always had an animal’s dislike of him since the 80’s. I first met him in Bob Gaccione’s OMNI magazine. With the many times he was on, or referenced to on Nation Public Radio (which I finally stopped tuning-in to in the Clinton years), I developed that instinct that animals have that tell them “this guy is up to no good”.
Now that you have written down your Chomsky Paradox and The Chomsky Affect they are copyrighted and future commentators should properly cite them. They are most relevant.
Oh, but the jewel in the crown was the Martin Luther quote and your explanation: “I suspect that that was what Luther was (ineffectively) articulating in his cautionary rant: reason is a delusion-trap disguised as the creator of truth using the language of being reasonable.” This is a keeper.
Good work, Guy.