OPM 154, July 18th Meditation (commemoration)

Although it didn’t initially arrive as a prompt for today’s commemoration, I was just now compelled to recognize for the first time the force of the expression, “heart to heart conversation.”  My friend Katie used it this evening when she told me that she was meeting up with her son down at the Town Landing beach, where I had just left with my own son after kayaking around the boats moored in the harbor.  Pizza box in one hand, dog leash in the other, Katie said, “He [her son] got in trouble today.  So we’ll have some pizza, and a heart to heart conversation.”  I nodded and smiled, the way fellow parents do when we have those moments of empathy and solidarity, and continued on my way.  But as twilight arrived and I sat down to write after reading the meditation written this day ten years ago, the intense sincerity of Katie’s words resonated in my memory, and I couldn’t help but make a connection between that expression I’ve heard so many times before and the insight I have been riding this past week that seems to be something akin to those mega waves Susan Casey documents in her book.   My own conceptual ‘Mavericks’ has been this week the giant wave created by the insight into the essential turn happening when we move into meditative thinking aka the turn from the mind to the heart.   I have been thinking a lot about that turn, although I’m not sure I have been thinking  it through the heart!  Indeed, I’m entirely sure I have a grasp on what it means to think through the heart, even though I have been working very hard to speculate on what this entails.  And in this sense, because it remains speculation, I can not claim to be doing phenomenology, but something like hermeneutical and exegetical work aka close readings of the original meditations that have disclosed new insights, such as the turn from the mind to the heart. 

And this is why Katie’s declaration was so revealing: “we’ll have…a heart to heart conversation.”  Mother and son, not just talking, but talking about what matters most: her love for him and her need to communicate this so that he understands his getting in trouble is not a exercise of parental power and control, but an expression of love and the desire to guide him into a healthy future.  The heart to heart conversation is in this sense preparatory  and anticipatory.  But it is also precisely what it claims to be: a communication happening between hearts.  

Again, the insight remains just that, and, to borrow from Socrates, all I know at the moment is that I don’t anything about how to translate the language of the heart because this language is ‘foreign’ to the discursive style of philosophy I am comfortable with.  [nb: upon confirming that ‘discursive’ was the best term I discovered the word has to different and almost contradictory denotations.  On the one hand it has the meaning that I had in mind: flowing, fluid, eloquent, expansive.  On the other hand, it has the opposite but related set of meanings that actually describe better my style of philosophical writing: rambling, digressive, meandering, wandering, maundering, diffuse, long, lengthy, wordy, verbose, long-winded, prolix; circuitous, roundabout; circumlocutory.]

All this to say that I  have confidence that I have identified some vocabulary to describe what is happening when we have turned from the mind to the heart and, for example, we engaged in a heart to heart conversation.  One of those words begins the writing that happened this day ten years ago: Engrossment.  “Engrossment in the other is another way of naming the intersubjectivity emerging from dialogic enjoinment.”  What I don’t say, however, is that this ‘dialogue’ is not the kind Socrates mediated, despite all that he claimed to have learned from Diotima’s doctrine of love!   But I can say this ten years later.   Or, rather, I can certainly point to there being a difference between a dialogue aimed at overcoming ignorance through a rational process of questioning and answering, and a conversation aimed at overcoming the existential divide that separates us, one from the other.    And I can speculate that what happens when we bridge that divide is the unmediated experience of love.  But this is how things stand:  I am left wondering about the thinking that happens through the heart, and I’m wondering how one writes philosophical from the heart?

There is a sentence that jumps out to me from the writing made this day ten years ago; a sentence that could be aphoristic fragment, if not the centerpiece of a longer fragment, and one that seems to address the foregoing commemorative commentary:

“The learner is the coincidence of the opposites ‘self/nonself’.”

I want to let this sentence stand as the distilled fragment from the writing made this day ten years ago.   And I want to conclude by reiterating some of the claims that revolve around the fragment, because I believe they indicate precisely what needs to be experienced if one is going to write philosophy from the heart:  the receptive modality of engrossment bears the mark of anatman (nonself); the dialogue that is founded on engrossment does not ‘annihilate’ the self, because the self is conserved in being received by the other; yet, in this dialogue another ‘self’ arises, a third self made from the communion of the two. [nb: here then is a deployment of the non-linear equation my graduate students and I articulated in the Fall 2013 semester:  1 + 1 = 3.  Despite its use of mathematical symbols, the equation only makes sense in the existential logic of intersubjective relationality.]