The meditation originally written for today had the date of March 8th, and this is because, as I've said many times in my commentary, 2004 was a leap year and February had 29 days. So, until today, I was one day 'ahead' in 2014. Tonight, however, when I read the meditation I mistakenly read the one originally written on March 9, 2004, and only realized it when I completed the reading. At that point I back-tracked and read the meditation from March 8, 2004. Now, it was quite interesting to see when I was done that the printed page from March 8 was actually unique and unlike any that had been read up to this point, because it included the aphoristic fragments that were written as postscripts to the meditation. The third fragment was the following: "Friendship. The Gift, Teachability, Learning, Destiny, the Tao...the Nameless, the Nothing as our destiny, our destiny which throws us back upon our standing in relation to beings..." Aside from the funkiness of the meditation from March 8th, which seems to have lept ahead into this day, the linguistic move I make in the meditation happens with a jam on the giving that makes up the relationship of Being and learning. I explore the giving of the self as a lending, a lending through listening. We lend our attention, our interest in listening to the other, in perceiving beings phenomenologically, which appear to us as the excess of Being. In giving ourselves we find that we are 'Lent'. Here the play seems to indicate that I was inspired by the season of Lent, and, indeed, as I have just confirmed, Fat Tuesday in 2004 was February 24th, which seems quite early, but confirms that those meditation in early March were inspired by the season of Lent. And as I say in my post-reading commentary, this play on giving as lending and then as being lent, continues my exploration of that threshold that stands in-between first philosophy and theology, which I have already moved within when I included terms from Buddhism, and now Christianity.
February 13, 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the original experiment that produced 363 phenomenological mediations, published as 'Being and Learning' (Brill: 2012). Each day between Feb 2014-15, I returned to the original meditations, and my commentary is documented here. And then, again, on February 15, 2024, on the 20th anniversary of the first days of the original experiment, I revisit and comment on a daily basis, once again.
(20/10 yrs later) - It was only the other day that I wrote in my 3.0 commentary that there is a theological dimension (I used the term spiritual) to this project, which was much more intense in 2004, than it is today, 20 years later. One of the motivations of the original daily meditation experiment, and it was truly an experiment, was the desire to get back to the feeling of excitement and energy I had as an undergrad studying philosophy at Fordham. Naturally, studying philosophy at Fordham was layered with theology, and I was quite fortunate to take a number of courses with Ewert Cousins, who was a founder of the inter-religious dialogue movement. Cousins was tapped into the mystical tradition across the world, and turned me on the possibility of mystical experience. And flash forward 20 years and now 40 years and I'm still inclined to wonder about mysticism, and the mystical experience. That wonder remains part of the project, although it's embedded in the project's work on music and listening to music. And the phenomenological description of the relationship between Being and Learning is often infused with the mystical. Moreover, the "poetic" language, mostly inspired by Heidegger, is probably the only form of language I know that can say something meaningful about the mystical character of the Being and Learning. So as I wrote 10 years ago, there is nothing accidental about my having turned to Lao Tzu and Buddha in the original. After all, the project was originally described as daily poetic phenomenological meditations!
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