OPM 143, July 7th Meditation (commemoration)

This morning, I reviewed the material that was written throughout the month of July ten years ago, and as far as I could see, none of it was included in Being and Learning.  What seems clear to me is that the feelings I was having as I was revisiting the material (a month ago) with regard to the gnawing repetition seems to be the same feelings I had when I was preparing the material for publication.  And, as a result, a month or more of writing was left on the floor of the proverbial editing room.  That makes even more interesting the decision to distill fragments from this material that was never published.   What's more, the decision not to record a reading of the material will mean it will that for the foreseeable future it will not see the light of publicity.

The fragment I distilled from OPM 142, yesterday's meditation, culminated with the following sentence: The true genius of the sage: he remains silent in the gathering of himself and the community.  Not surprising, the meditation written this day ten years ago, OPM 143, begins "Caring not to speak about the Tao is to care for Being, for in remaining silent about that which is ineffable, we wait upon the freedom conserved in the 'not yet'. To care for Being is...the receptive modality [of] painstaking listening."  

I was reminded yesterday by a reader of this blog that freedom is one of the most enduring and important of the subject matter taken up in these meditations.   And after re-reading just now the post from July 4th, I was struck by the intensity of my thinking on freedom.  I don't say this in a self-congratulatory mood.   Rather, I'm only sharing an observation, an impression, and offering a description of a meditation on freedom that is deeply counter-cultural in the sense that it represents an interruption of the dominant cultural narrative of western modernity that insists freedom is a natural right, something we are endowed with at birth. When coupled with equality, there is no question that this is a powerful political narrative, so powerful that it is not unlike the weapons used to insist its veracity; indeed, like all ordinances, the narrative retains a kind of neutrality until they are taken up and subsequently deployed by human hands.   My own thinking on freedom, which is uncoupled from equality, insists on this historicity and cultural conditionality.  Perhaps I am impossibly rooted in the western cultural narrative when I insist that freedom is anything but 'natural,' even if by this it is meant a character of human nature, and not Nature.   Freedom is a cultural artifact: something made by particular humans at particular moments in history for specific reasons.  The inability of some to recognize this historicity has lead to all sorts of confusion, particularly when it becomes impossible to avoid the equivocation between a revolution, an uprising, and a civil war, not to mention a coup d'etat.  This is why it is crucially important to qualify the freedom that is made with some precision, e.g., when on July 4th I wrote of freedom as emancipation aka the ongoing freedom made by the slaves through congregational music-making, first in the fields, then in the churches, revival tents, and beyond in the bandstands, studios, and dance halls.  This is not a progression movement, but an exodus.  [For the record, my inspiration for this thinking is W.E.B. DuBois, specifically his Souls of Black Folk].  

Now, the meditation written this day ten years ago emphasizes the centrality of listening and of waiting, and turns, again, through Heidegger to gelassenheit (freedom as releasement to letting-being).  Borrowed also is Lao Tzu's description of the Tao as the organization of the opposites that persist in the dialectical logic of Being.  He describes this organization and our perception of it as 'the Mysterious Agreement.'   Gelassenheit represents our movement into the close proximity of this coincidence of opposites.  As Heidegger attempted to demonstrate in his dialogic piece, Conversation On A Country Path, we may perceive and hence be-with this location if and when we allow language to take us there.  This is why listening remains the recurring starting point: the origin in the sense of that modality where the power of propulsion, which moves us, passes. (I often describe this ontological location: the threshold). The very exchange between the participants in the dialogue, which I cite in OPM 143, indicates how this movement unfolds insofar as they are taken away by the power of what Lao Tzu calls the Mysterious Agreement: 

"{Teacher}...for in the region in which we stay everything is in the best order only if it has been no one's doing. {Scientist} A mysterious region where there is nothing for which to be answerable. {Teacher} Because it is the region of the word, which is answerable to itself alone. {Scholar} For us it remains only to listen to the answer proper to the word. {Teacher} That is enough; even when our telling is only a retelling of the answer heard."

Here then is the fragment distilled from the unpublished writing made this day in 2004:

What is common between the congregation of the community, and the assembling of the self, is the force of gathering that is always already persisting before the self and its others are brought together.  The genius of the sage, his silence, is a demonstration of the comportment of the one who understands that the need to receive direction before making, before acting. This is precisely why learning is prior to making, prior to acting.  Learning is the reception of direction, when we are shown the possible pathways to be taken, the materials to be formed, the ground to be cultivated.  This showing is itself a formation and cultivation, the gathering force that gathers the self and  the community.  In sum, the silence of the sage is the recognition that he does not produce but only conveys the force that forms and cultivates.