OPM 106 offers another phenomenological account of 'meditation,' and it is only at this moment that the word 'MEDITATION' has jumped out at me in full force: OPM aka originary poetic MEDITATIONS! Why only now...perhaps because, like the proverbial fish I can not perceive the water I swim in?!
Put another way, if I were asked to point to a set of writing that signpost the whole experiment, or that seem to have really captured 'the thing itself' that I am documenting, describing...that is confronting me, seizing me, compelling me to write about it...then these meditations on 'meditative thinking' would be the ones.
To understand this one needs to read slowly and carefully...listening and hearing what is being conveyed...and, to paraphrase Heraclitus, who I cite in the second sentence, listen not to me..."The posture of meditative thinking places us precisely in that location that Heraclitus points to when he says 'For wisdom, listen not to me but the Word...'
Meditative thinking is a 'posture' [a respectful nod to my yoga friends...Namaste] that 'places' us in 'precisely' in that location where Heraclitus points....that location of listening to the Word...Logos, which I have been translating (because this work is an ongoing translation of the same Word) as 'sage'...as in 'saying' (Sage). But the 'saying' of the 'sage' is...silence...s/he points beyond language...to the ineffable...what can not be said...
Again, we need to stop, listen, read carefully, slowly...in fact, there is a kind of ruse happening here, yes? A bit of the trickster routine...'beyond language' is only a symbol, a category, a placeholder for the 'out of bounds,' specifically, the interruption of the 'everyday,' specifically, the logic of the calculative, the linear, 9-5 world, etc., etc. OPM 106: "Meditative thinking, or better, the practice of meditation, locates one 'outside' of the comings and goings of everyday life, outside of this most habitual habitation." [I wonder if May 30th was the day that my daughters were making a truly annoying racket while I was writing? Is there an 'other' more grounded and embodied phenomenology that is being written in these meditations? Is the 'habitual habitation' a euphemism for whinny children, grocery shopping, laundry, dishes and the whole family circus?]
'Out of bounds'...this can be dangerous, even if we aren't referring to the 'bounds' as family life! Dangerous because, as the same ancient Greeks taught me, hubris never ends well. Is 'meditative thinking' an act of hubris? NO! On the contrary, 'meditative thinking' is a huge leap of faith in whatever it is that is calling us to step out of the everyday, the expected, the 'normal' and routine. OPM 106: "This standing outside has been called 'ek-sistence', which is another way of writing ekstasis. We call the outside standing of the meditative thinker ekstasis. It took weeks and weeks for me to describe the destruction of the juridical and analytical ego as ekstasis. Of course it did! I'm only now, on day 106, disinterested in making insurgency on 'schooling' or 'education'. Indeed, once the sage arrives, I've become a wanderer, a nomad.
Whenever I write or read the word 'ekstasis' this awful statue appears before me. It's Bernini's statue of Teresa de Avila. I remember seeing an image of it when I was an undergrad, and it made me nauseous. I was totally disappointed, because of my reverence for the mystic tradition, specifically the Spanish mystics -- who I strongly identified/identify with. I've just now discovered that there is a fresco of a skeleton on the floor besides the statue...I can relate to that skeleton...who also seems nauseated by the statue...
The skeleton works much better for me, because it really does capture the reduction happening with ekstasis. We are in meditative thinking 'outside of ourselves' in the sense of having everything, in that moment, stripped away...beyond 'nudity'...so not even the 'carne' but only the 'huesos' remain...
This is the "state of seizure (pathema)" where we are "thrown outside".
Definitely not hubris! OPM 106, from the conclusion, first citing Heidegger, then commenting: "'to stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself in approaching us. That which shows itself at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery.' Meditative thinking conditions one...to attend to the openness of the mystery..."
Mystery: ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘mystic presence, hidden religious symbolism’): from Old French mistere or Latin mysterium, from Greek mustērion; related to mystic.
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Put another way, if I were asked to point to a set of writing that signpost the whole experiment, or that seem to have really captured 'the thing itself' that I am documenting, describing...that is confronting me, seizing me, compelling me to write about it...then these meditations on 'meditative thinking' would be the ones.
To understand this one needs to read slowly and carefully...listening and hearing what is being conveyed...and, to paraphrase Heraclitus, who I cite in the second sentence, listen not to me..."The posture of meditative thinking places us precisely in that location that Heraclitus points to when he says 'For wisdom, listen not to me but the Word...'
Meditative thinking is a 'posture' [a respectful nod to my yoga friends...Namaste] that 'places' us in 'precisely' in that location where Heraclitus points....that location of listening to the Word...Logos, which I have been translating (because this work is an ongoing translation of the same Word) as 'sage'...as in 'saying' (Sage). But the 'saying' of the 'sage' is...silence...s/he points beyond language...to the ineffable...what can not be said...
Again, we need to stop, listen, read carefully, slowly...in fact, there is a kind of ruse happening here, yes? A bit of the trickster routine...'beyond language' is only a symbol, a category, a placeholder for the 'out of bounds,' specifically, the interruption of the 'everyday,' specifically, the logic of the calculative, the linear, 9-5 world, etc., etc. OPM 106: "Meditative thinking, or better, the practice of meditation, locates one 'outside' of the comings and goings of everyday life, outside of this most habitual habitation." [I wonder if May 30th was the day that my daughters were making a truly annoying racket while I was writing? Is there an 'other' more grounded and embodied phenomenology that is being written in these meditations? Is the 'habitual habitation' a euphemism for whinny children, grocery shopping, laundry, dishes and the whole family circus?]
'Out of bounds'...this can be dangerous, even if we aren't referring to the 'bounds' as family life! Dangerous because, as the same ancient Greeks taught me, hubris never ends well. Is 'meditative thinking' an act of hubris? NO! On the contrary, 'meditative thinking' is a huge leap of faith in whatever it is that is calling us to step out of the everyday, the expected, the 'normal' and routine. OPM 106: "This standing outside has been called 'ek-sistence', which is another way of writing ekstasis. We call the outside standing of the meditative thinker ekstasis. It took weeks and weeks for me to describe the destruction of the juridical and analytical ego as ekstasis. Of course it did! I'm only now, on day 106, disinterested in making insurgency on 'schooling' or 'education'. Indeed, once the sage arrives, I've become a wanderer, a nomad.
Whenever I write or read the word 'ekstasis' this awful statue appears before me. It's Bernini's statue of Teresa de Avila. I remember seeing an image of it when I was an undergrad, and it made me nauseous. I was totally disappointed, because of my reverence for the mystic tradition, specifically the Spanish mystics -- who I strongly identified/identify with. I've just now discovered that there is a fresco of a skeleton on the floor besides the statue...I can relate to that skeleton...who also seems nauseated by the statue...
The skeleton works much better for me, because it really does capture the reduction happening with ekstasis. We are in meditative thinking 'outside of ourselves' in the sense of having everything, in that moment, stripped away...beyond 'nudity'...so not even the 'carne' but only the 'huesos' remain...
This is the "state of seizure (pathema)" where we are "thrown outside".
Definitely not hubris! OPM 106, from the conclusion, first citing Heidegger, then commenting: "'to stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself in approaching us. That which shows itself at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery.' Meditative thinking conditions one...to attend to the openness of the mystery..."
Mystery: ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘mystic presence, hidden religious symbolism’): from Old French mistere or Latin mysterium, from Greek mustērion; related to mystic.
3.0 - 10 years later I would certainly not describe the "beyond language" as a trickster move, or a philosophical ruse, or even a sincere metaphor. What's miss in that description is what earlier this week I described as the mystic overtones. The beginning of learning with the replacement of the ego and the will to knowledge is a turning toward what "escapes" language in the sense that the experience -- the beginning of learning -- is before understanding, is pre-cognitive, and hence before words. This beginning is captured by Heraclitus' fragment, that is included in OPM 106: "The posture of meditative thinking places us precisely in that location that Heraclitus points to when he says 'For wisdom, listen not to me but the Word...'" This posture of meditative thinking is listening, the receptive modality of phenomenology. Learning begins with listening. Heraclitus demonstrates the sage as a pointer, the messenger, but also the one who demonstrates learning as rooted in the encounter with the significant object. "Listen not to me but to the Word," indicates that learning is essentially a receptive experiential situation. I was considering this yesterday when I was reading Freire and trying to locate his well known formula about literacy: read the word, read the world. I'm considering that as the possible third moment of the dialectic of reading, as a way to play out Arendt's assertion that education is the preparation for repair and renewal of the word. When reviewing Freire I wondered about his critique of "banking education," which is mostly a denouncement of the autocratic teacher. There seems to be a more nuanced alternative to the banking educator in the figure of the sage who, like Heraclitus, is insisting that the student listen not to them but to the Word, aka focus on the object of study and thus not on the student's "interpretation" of said object. Freire is more Nietzschean than his readers have acknowledged insofar as power is at the core of his project. But despite his ontology of becoming, power emerges as a fairly static phenomenon with his description of the education: it either resides in the autocratic teacher, or in the teacher-student/student-teacher. The traditional relationship is the Hegelian master/slave, while the other is the emancipated consciousness of intersubjectivity. The shift is from monologue to dialogue, but the circulation of the "word" remains between subjects. The alternative I am mapping out identifies the Word in the object of study. The learner is subjected to the subject matter, is captivated by the object of study. Wonder and curiosity drives learning, especially at the beginning. The object of study generates interest and calls out learning.
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