I was made ready for today's commemoration of the writing from this day (108) when I read the epigraph today (on the beach at Kettle Cove, Cape Elizabeth, Maine) to Brian Bauer's The Sacred Landscape of the Inca (The Cusco Ceque System) (Austin: 1998):
"...the city of Cusco was the house and dwelling place of god, and thus there was not in all of it, a fountain, or road, or wall that they did not say contained a mystery, which can be seen from the list of shrines in that city, of which there were more than four hundred..." [Juan Polo de Ondegardo, 1571] In reading this I was immediately reminded of the story of Heraclitus that organized chapter 5 of Being and Learning, where he says to his visitors while warming his hands by the fireplace in his home: "here too the gods are present." Indicating the persistent presence of the gods as a sign of the sacred, the location where the gods too (also) are dwelling.
Without intending to be clever, I would say that there is something truly mysterious happening between between 'mystery' and 'mystic' in this writing. OPM 106 announced the link between 'mystery' and 'mystic'. As I wrote in the commentary, "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..." I then concluded the commentary with the following etymology:
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.
The phenomenology is an account of meditative thinking, which is only at this point being named as such within the writing. Describing what is happening without offering a meta-analysis, or a systemic account, the phenomenology is an account of the practice as it is happening. (Hence, the repetitive nature of the writing). It is one thing to offer an account of the practice; to write about the ontology of the meditative time and space where one has withdrawn in solitude. Such writing...as writing...moves within the boundary of language and is thus always pointing to that which offers the time and space for meditation. Put otherwise, meditative thinking is the experience of being in this unique time and space. That is why it is called 'ontological': meditative happens as an experience in specific kind of time and space. In turn, it is another matter to indicate that special location, which can never be described, or, rather, can only ever receive a human description. A gap persists and remains between the one who meditates and the time and space that allows for the meditation. For me, this unbridgeable 'gap' or 'ontological difference' is where the mysterious relation between mystery and mystic arises. If the mystic is the one who experiences most intensely the ontology of meditative thinking, s/he does so in the most profound silence where all s/he can do is hear and listen, and probably on the latter. In the stages I have mapped, the mystical is one step beyond contemplation, which is one step beyond meditation, the last of the modalities where writing is possible.
When Heidegger write, "That which shows itself at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery," he can be read as indicating a kind of undertow or force that pulls us into meditative thinking and beyond to contemplation, and perhaps, the mystical experience. In OPM 108, Lao Tzu returns and weighs in on the mysterious mystery that pulls us into meditative thinking: "Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful." And: "Always without desire we must be found, if its deep mystery we would sound." Because, as I wrote just now, it seems to me the mystical experience is deeply sonic insofar as all one do is perceive or hear what is happening, I am particularly drawn to Lao Tzu likening what I am calling learning to 'sounding' the deep mystery. This 'sounding' is the inspiration behind the tradition of chanting and breathing that are integral to congregational spiritual exercises.
"...the city of Cusco was the house and dwelling place of god, and thus there was not in all of it, a fountain, or road, or wall that they did not say contained a mystery, which can be seen from the list of shrines in that city, of which there were more than four hundred..." [Juan Polo de Ondegardo, 1571] In reading this I was immediately reminded of the story of Heraclitus that organized chapter 5 of Being and Learning, where he says to his visitors while warming his hands by the fireplace in his home: "here too the gods are present." Indicating the persistent presence of the gods as a sign of the sacred, the location where the gods too (also) are dwelling.
Without intending to be clever, I would say that there is something truly mysterious happening between between 'mystery' and 'mystic' in this writing. OPM 106 announced the link between 'mystery' and 'mystic'. As I wrote in the commentary, "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..." I then concluded the commentary with the following etymology:
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.
The phenomenology is an account of meditative thinking, which is only at this point being named as such within the writing. Describing what is happening without offering a meta-analysis, or a systemic account, the phenomenology is an account of the practice as it is happening. (Hence, the repetitive nature of the writing). It is one thing to offer an account of the practice; to write about the ontology of the meditative time and space where one has withdrawn in solitude. Such writing...as writing...moves within the boundary of language and is thus always pointing to that which offers the time and space for meditation. Put otherwise, meditative thinking is the experience of being in this unique time and space. That is why it is called 'ontological': meditative happens as an experience in specific kind of time and space. In turn, it is another matter to indicate that special location, which can never be described, or, rather, can only ever receive a human description. A gap persists and remains between the one who meditates and the time and space that allows for the meditation. For me, this unbridgeable 'gap' or 'ontological difference' is where the mysterious relation between mystery and mystic arises. If the mystic is the one who experiences most intensely the ontology of meditative thinking, s/he does so in the most profound silence where all s/he can do is hear and listen, and probably on the latter. In the stages I have mapped, the mystical is one step beyond contemplation, which is one step beyond meditation, the last of the modalities where writing is possible.
When Heidegger write, "That which shows itself at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery," he can be read as indicating a kind of undertow or force that pulls us into meditative thinking and beyond to contemplation, and perhaps, the mystical experience. In OPM 108, Lao Tzu returns and weighs in on the mysterious mystery that pulls us into meditative thinking: "Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful." And: "Always without desire we must be found, if its deep mystery we would sound." Because, as I wrote just now, it seems to me the mystical experience is deeply sonic insofar as all one do is perceive or hear what is happening, I am particularly drawn to Lao Tzu likening what I am calling learning to 'sounding' the deep mystery. This 'sounding' is the inspiration behind the tradition of chanting and breathing that are integral to congregational spiritual exercises.
{For the Record, it took me no fewer than 15 attempts to record the reading of OPM 108. It finally happened, at 7:00pmEST during the Dead Zone [the Clarence Clemmons tribute show]...coinciding with the climatic moment from 'Estimated Prophet'...of course!!!...'Them voices tell me so, they tell me I lead the way, so don't worry about me now."}
3.0 - I've mentioned before that my stated intention of getting back to the way I approached philosophy when I was an undergrad at Fordham was related to my interest in mysticism. I can't say that I knew much about mysticism before I studied the Christian mystics at Fordham, but I do recall having a sense or feeling for mysticism as early as I can remember. Of course I didn't have a name for it until later. OPM 108 makes a nice play on "mystery" and "mystic," pointing to the sense of the One or the feeling of cosmic unity, the connection of all living beings, or simply Being. At its core the relationship between Being and Learning is a "mystical" one because it begins in a precognitive, prelinguistic modality. The initial originary experience with Being is ineffable. It escapes language and for that reason I say, learning begins with listening. There is a sense in which I am diluting the mystical experience and making it seem less mysterious because it seems, well, ordinary. But perhaps this is where the mystery of the mystical is rooted, in the perception and awareness of the "ordinary" as extraordinary. Hence Heraclitus in an apparently mundane situation declaring, "The gods are present here too." And Lao Tzu, who makes another appearance, saying "Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful. If the mystery is found in the ordinary, then learning is happening when we are engaged in the depth of the everyday. Something about this line of interpretation reminds me of the New England Transcendentalists. Finding the poetic in the prosaic. Thoreau and Emerson were all about the poetry of the everyday, and Thoreau's Walden is an experiment in living poetically. Thoreau is considered a mystic and drew on Eastern mysticism, specifically Hinduism. He found the One in Nature, which can hardly be considered ordinary. Nature is outside of these categories that denote the world, or what is made by human hands. The mystic finds the One wherever and whenever he or she experiences the Unity, which I qualified above as the Unity of all living things. And now I just dialectically reversed that position and said that Nature was in its own category. I'll have to pick this up tomorrow, because I feel I've encountered a conundrum. I'm good with the description of the mystic experience as experiencing the extraordinary in the ordinary. But this might have to be the poetic disposition that one is left with after the mystical experience with Unity. Because the mystical is a spiritual experience, and encounter with Being or the totality of existence, which can denote all living things, or all things experienced as animated. Hence the aesthetic experience has qualities that are mystical. To be continued!
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