OPM 138, July 2nd Meditation (not included in Being and Learning)

OPM 138 picks up where 137 left off, and offers another meditation on dwelling.  The key quotation is a citation of Heidegger: "To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature."

The free sphere is the clearing that has been discussed many times, as recently as last week when I was on Mt. Desert Island and found a clearing when we were hiking on Gorham mountain.  Heidegger has multiple names for this special location where meditative thinking arises.  In this quotation, the free, or the free sphere is the location where we are set at peace, and in this modality of peace we find ourselves taking up the phenomenological position of letting-be.  We inhabit the free, which is another way of saying that we inhabit freedom.  Here is another version of Heidegger's assertion that we do not so much possess freedom as freedom possesses us.  And in being possessed by freedom we are set at peace and find ourselves to be in our proper nature alongside all other things.  To the extent that we have a consciousness or awareness of this order of things, we are dwelling in the free, and are at peace.

In OPM 138 I turn to the Buddhist tradition for some language to describe this awareness, and borrow the category of 'wide awakenes.' I link wide awakeness with attunement, and contemplate the states of anatman (nonself) and anitya (impermanence), two of the Dharma Seals.  A Dharma Seal that I did not contemplate this day ten years ago is the ninth seal of the future human civilization, which, given the direction of the meditations, would have been an appropriate one to take up:

Yesterday in my commentary in response to OPM 137 I had a kind of epiphanic experience.  I say 'kind of' because it was a profound realization that came about through a memory.  In turn, it is properly described as a re-collection, a gathering of myself.   The moment occurred as I recalled my focused work on Arendt, the writing that has consistently focussed on thinking as the disclosure of singularity.  I've written much on this, especially on the unique time and space that give rise to thinking.  The one major interruption and exception to that work happened with the year long writing experiment being commemorated here in this blog. And it happened via the return to that other major concern of mine: dialogue and intersubjectivity.  Yesterday it seemed to me that the incommensurability between these two concerns revealed itself quite intensely, especially when I recalled the essay I wrote and published for Arendt and Education.  

That memory sparked a series of memories, most having to do with the failure of the joint ventures I have undertaken in the past few years, and the recurring experience of setting unreasonable expectations for those collaborations.   These memories, some of them painful because they included the realization that gestures of generosity have been rewarded with cold-shoulders, brought me back further to that place where I move when I am focused on Arendt, and, at times, on Heidegger, but not consistently enough when I was writing these meditations ten years ago.  The experiment was full of ideals and aspirations, and perhaps a leap into the possibility of  what might actually happen if and when a trusted band of real comrades in thinking would congregate. While I have experienced this episodically, the sustained community of thinkers has yet to be realized.  Of course, the realization of the ideal congregation can only happened when gathered by a Spirit that is always greater than the individuals in the collective.  One must remain ever hopeful that such a Spirit will gather together and sustain a real community!  For now, I have been returned to myself, and gathered into the singularity of this self, the authority of the author who dwells alone, like Socrates in his jail cell after his family and friends have left him.   

Being recollected with my existentialist self lead me today to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I was also lead to Marcus after thinking further about the noted failed opportunity to write fragments and thereby, once and for all, break from the narrative writing that produced the 'epic' that is Being and Learning.  Of course, the self-criticism I made yesterday was a version of the one I shared two weeks ago, when I recalled my experience of going to PES 2005 in San Francisco (OPM 126 commentary).   In other words, soon after completing the year long experiment I had the idea of distilling the meditations into fragments.   Recalling that  missed opportunity again yesterday lead me today to Marcus, and the very first fragment I read of his coincides perfectly with the link Heidegger is making between dwelling, peace, freedom, and the order of things.  The fragment is number 9, from book 2:

"Always keep the following points in mind: what the nature of the whole is, and what my own nature is; and how my nature is related to that of the whole, and what kind of a part it is and what kind of a whole; and that no one can prevent you, in all that you do and say, from always being in accord with that nature of which you are a part."

Here is an example of the succinct writing I admire most, and, had I been able to muster the patience and discipline, I would have attempted to write such fragments, or distill them from the meditations.  As important as the form of the writing is the content of what he is saying, especially the connection between what Marcus calls 'my own nature' and 'that of the whole...that nature of which you are a part.'  Here we see the importance of knowing what my colleague and good friend Stacy Smith calls our 'intention,' which is a version of 'my own nature.'  As I understand it the Stoic meditation is not simply an articulation of general philosophical principles that bear on individual practice, but also a way of arriving at that knowledge that brings one into knowledge of 'my own nature' such that the practice is indeed that of an individual or 'my own.' 
 In sum, achieving the consciousness of 'wide awakeness' happens when one is 'set at peace' in the 'free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature' including and especially 'my own.'   And yet, paradoxically, this insight gathered from Heidegger, Buddha, and Marcus, seems to be at the same time in concert and in conflict with a fragments I have just now distilled from OPM 138: "The spirit of the learner who seeks to live in peace with others and harmony with nature is part of the community that is cultivated. The learner is both a cultivator, one who sows seeds and reaps the barvest, and the cultivated, one who bears the fruit.  But in order to flourish as a learner...one must entrust one's self the other, to the community."  Tonight, as I taste this bitter draught that I have distilled from OPM 138, my response is to insist that this 'other' is the self's other with whom he is in dialogue when meditating; the self of the past and the self of the future, and, thus, a moving, shifting self.  And, further, I say that this 'community' is not a human congregation, but, rather, the congregation of all living beings, or what Marcus (as well as Heraclitus and Lao Tzu) idealized as Nature.