OPM 261(262), November 3rd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, p. 260

It’s the third day of November, and much further south from where I sit the mountains and valleys are covered with snow.  Here, in NJ, I am able to sit outside and write my commentary.   There is a slight chill in the air, and the wind is blustery, but the sun offers warmth, enough to remind me of where I was moving before the beginning of the fall semester, and where I have been going since it got underway.  In the past month since my Heraclitus lecture, which was composed in the wake of a summer spent dwelling with Thoreau under the law of Nature, I made a slow return back into the city, moving through the gates of Athens, Rome, Jerusalem and Memphis.   In Memphis I found a proper balance between the flow of the river and the movement of the streets.   And last Thursday my HUHC C&E section insisted we hold class around the replica of the labyrinth at Chartes Cathedral in France, just outside our classroom:

“Hofstra’s Labyrinth is 40 feet in diameter, and is constructed from slabs of granite bricks that are each 2 ¼ inches thick. The Chartres Labyrinth dates back to 1200 and is an 11th degree labyrinth.  A labyrinth does not go past the 11th degree because of the 12th degree disciple who betrayed Jesus.  The original design was most likely designed by a priest.  The Chartres Labyrinth was originally for people who could not make the pilgrimage to the holy land.  By walking and completing the labyrinth, it was looked upon as a spiritual substitute for making the pilgrimage. Labyrinths are seen as symbols of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment.  To walk the labyrinth properly, and stay in the lines it helps to clear the mind of all stresses as it takes a level of concentration and focus.

As you walk the labyrinth you find yourself absorbed in the task and you begin to filter out the external world, as you work your way out of the labyrinth it symbolizes walking back into the world with a better understanding of your own internal identity.   Unlike mazes, labyrinths have only one way in and one way out. They have no dead ends like a maze, instead they continue until you reach the center.  When a person actually makes it to the center rosette pattern within the labyrinth, it is considered a passage that is only halfway complete. To finish the experience completely, a person must walk the labyrinth back out. Only then will the journey be complete.” 

The inspiration for moving outside was the unseasonably warm sunny weather we were experiencing.   Little did we know that the labyrinth would organizing an experimental in dialogic learning, taking us into its center rosette.    As it happened, the class discussion took up Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, and our focus was on a question of faith posed by the lecturer: ‘Is faith something you do?  Or is faith something that happens to you?’   For me, the whole experiment was an enactment of faith: faith in the students and their will to take up the authority granted to them by taking turns in raising and responding to from the seat of authority that was opened up by the center rosette.   Afterwards, as I was hustling over to WRHU to record the Dead Zone,  I caught up with one of my students and asked her what she thought of our impromptu educational experiment. “It felt like we were back in ancient Athens.”  And, then, with a smile, added, “koinonia!”  Koinonia indeed!!!  I’m definitely going to return to think further about our Chartes labyrinth, especially in relation to the statue of Frederick Douglass, which sits no more than 100 feet away!

 Koinonia!  The past few days have been, among other things, organized around the relation the Open, wonder (thaumazein) and love (agape).    Yesterday’s writing offered the following assertion: Learning is an event of koinonia: the gathering of the community via the force of shared love that is always already a primordial love, the ceaseless offering of life.   On 11/3/04 (BL 260) the Open is described as making a “wordly appearance” by way of compassion.    Worldly constitutes the embodiment of the Open.  And this worldly appearance happens via listening, compassionate listening.    Put another way, the appearance of the love that gathers together a community happens via the power or force generated by the radical openness of compassionate listening.   Listening is an offering of agape, and with this offering we experience a gathering force; specifically, the gathering force that brings a many together in the spirit of a common project. 

With the heart we encounter the twofold disclosure of Being’s Becoming: presencing (revelation)/absencing (hiding).    All saying (singing) comes from the heart; all listening (compassion) is received into the heart.   This is why on 11/3/04, I reiterate with a Bonaventurian voice that the heart is the place where we encounter the vestige of “Being’s originary dispensation…originary ‘gift’.” (BL 260)  Because the thinking that re-calls this offering is dialogic, I describe it in sonic terms.  The dialogue of the learning community, as a gathering of this originary dispensation via recollection – and embodied  re-membering – is “an echo of Being’s essential sway…saying…is the singing that resounds with this echo, sounding in the emptiness of the heart where the truth of concealment dwells.” (BL 260)   The heart is thus the center rosette – the thorn encircled heart --  where the originary leaves its presence as a vestige.  A vestige is an echo, the living presence of the original sound.  ‘”The echo re-sounds the originary saying, the singing that dispenses, distributes, through an arranging that preserves and designates the ‘inner space’ of the improvisational.” (BL 260)****"A surprise bonus awaits you at the center of the Hofstra Labyrinth – it echoes. It is thought that the echo is caused by the wind bouncing back and forth between the three surrounding buildings..."****
The one side of the dialogue, saying something (presencing), is always co-existing with the other, listening.  If saying is a presencing (temporally ‘present’) listening is a reception (temporally ‘past’ and ‘future’).  Saying simultaneously withdraw into the past and leaps into the future with listening, and in this way the dialogic event is described as a moving present (a movement that has been characterized as confrontation, polemos,  or war with the rectilinear.   In this sense the labyrinth is a powerful architectural representation of the place where the learning community moves. 

Yes, the labyrinth, but, here, I also recall the parallel cords bursting forth in the Incan quipu. cf.  OPM 92, May 16th

“The community of learners is the chorale, that congregation, where this resounding resonates in the dialogic event when the distinct voices are en-joined through the…re-collection of the originary arrangement [when] each re-turns to its ‘proper’ location.”(11/04/04 BL 260)