OPM 148, July 12th Meditation (commemoration)

There are very few places where one finds Heidegger reading from that Warburg’s ‘old book.’  He did write a dialogue based on a conversation he had with a visiting Japanese philosopher.   And while I don’t have the details in front of me, I know that at one point he was working on translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching.  Otherwise, he mostly concerned himself with a hermeneutics of the west, focusing most the ancients, and the preSocratics in particular.  So it is a pleasant surprise when one reads a sentence, such as the following, which concluded the meditation from July 11, 2004:  “The words ‘event of appropriation’ thought of in terms of the matter indicated, should now speak as a key term in the service of thinking.  As such a key term, it can no more be translated than the Greek logos, or the Chinese tao.”

This quotation prompts today’s commemoration because it moves along the ongoing engagement with the ‘event of appropriation’ that has captured my attention for the past week.   I have been thinking this event as ‘gathering’.  However, the writing that took it up ten years ago saw it as an occasion to explore further meditative thinking at the limits of language, identifying the event with the meditated encounter with those limits, or what I call the disclosure of ineffability.  The just cited quotation returns me to this aspect of the event.  That it, reminds me that the event of appropriation is a symbol of the boundary where ‘language’ encounters its limits.   And this is precisely why meditative thinking is an experience closer to that moment of contemplation when the ‘I’ is dissolved and the ego emptied.   If we recall Plotinus, who made a brief cameo appearance, we can borrow his description of being-with the One.  There is no description that can be made of that experience, which only begs the (analytic) question: then how do you know you had an transcendent experience?

A way to sidestep this question is to dismiss it as question from the discourse that is already predisposed to dismiss any experience that cannot be verified discursively.  While I’m tempted to take this or a similar approach, I’m inclined to find the question to be legitimate.  I want to meet the challenge of communicating the experience of contemplation, which I have consistently identified as a step beyond meditation.   Meditation takes us to contemplation, but is not an experience we will ourselves into.  On the contrary, it happens when we will non-willing, which is precisely what happens via meditative thinking.   So I can say something about preparing for contemplation by describing a quietude that takes us toward the aforementioned limits of language.  As I’ve repeated many times: meditative thinking begins with listening, hearing, with silence, and in this case, it is not the silence of the restraint regarding critique of the past and present state of affairs, but the silence of saying, the restraint from any speaking, the focus on breathing, and the calming of the discursive mind.   At this beginning we shift our energy from the mind to the heart, which is the gateway or threshold beyond language and toward contemplation.  The event of appropriation happens through the heart.

The shift from the mind to the heart is a central focus of the writing this day ten years ago, and we see this in the predominance of the word ‘compassion’.  “Compassion is the ek-static leap taken…”   The leap of faith, the leap of hope, the arrival of the perceived future?  Not yet.  This is the second leap.  The one taken by the empowered self, the one who returns from the event of appropriation.  Compassion is the shift to the heart, a transcendent moment when the suffering of the present (the passion) gives way to a kinship with the totality, when we find ourselves in communion with the seemingly infinite fecundity of life.   The transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson wrote of this, and there’s no question they were also reading from Warburg’s ‘old book,’ specifically the chapters on the two Indian philosophies:  the ancient Indigenous teachings of the Wabanaki, the Penobscot, et al, and the ancient Vedic teachings, especially the Gita.  Here we discover that the kinship between ancient traditions is an expression of the ontological connection between humanity and the totality (Being) meditated by the bridge that links Nature and Spirit.  Can human consciousness capable of locating this bridge?   Or perhaps the question is: can the human being  be located on this bridge?  If so, perhaps meditative thinking prepares us to be relocated there?  And perhaps it is the human heart that guides us when we are placed there?    

In light of these questions it is worth quoting again the citation that concludes OPM 148: “…what the term ‘event of appropriation’ wishes to indicate really speaks to us directly from the very nearness of that neighborhood in which we already reside.  For what could be closer to us than what brings us nearer to where we belong, to where we are belongers, to the event of appropriation?”

Here then, is a fragment distilled from the writing from this day, ten years ago:

Meditative thinking happens through various turnings, some that are defined as re-turns.  Of these, the turn from the mind to the heart is the one that directs us into meditative thinking.