OPM 304(305), December 20th (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 318-319

Today, thinking/writing in the stream of

https://archive.org/details/gd1993-12-10.sbd.fix-1599.tetzeli.74212.flac16

-- more December 93…this is a beginning to end show, because Branford Marsalis is on stage with his horns! --

[this is also the show that my oldest daughter, Katerina, attended in utero.  She was born 5 months later, not too far from the LA Sports Arena where this show was performed!]

My accounting is getting a bit out of whack, and it seems that I realized on 12/20/04 that I had been off a day, and then adjusted for the error.  And today I just realized the correction, but nothing has been thrown off.  Nevertheless I want to begin by citing the quotation of Chuang Tzu that concludes that brings to a climatic conclusion from meditation from 12/19/04 that turns to the East in an deeply ecumenical moment that insists on the eternal recurrence of the originary, and the universality of the movement of the Spirit that gathers the learner into the state of rapture, where “the dwelling of learning happens with the unleashing with the unleashing of the imaginative that unfolds in the encounter with the sublime, the reception of the awesome and overwhelming freedom preserved by the Open as radical plurality and difference, which is conveyed through the originary dispensation that ‘stamps’ or invests natality, [that] is recollected in the poetic dialogic even and the production of the new. The actualization of the aesthetic state of learning…re-collects and affirms the encompassing gathering of the Open as the ubiquity and pan-aesthetic existence of Being.  Rapture is the ecstatic dwelling in this aesthetic state that we now identify as the Way of Be-ing.”(BL 317)  

n  [“so many roads, so many roads, so many roads, to ease my soul, so many roads”] –

Chuang Tzu brings us back to that Law of Nature that I was thinking/writing under in July and August when I was taken into the Maine wilderness with Thoreau and there, with him, re-collected our primal past, and on August 4^th in my commentary cited The Philosopher himself:

Here is the important citation from Aristotle, Rhetoric (book 1, chapter 13):

“By two kinds of law I mean particular law and universal law.  Particular law is that which each community lays down and applies to its own members: this is partly written and partly unwritten.  Universal law is the law of nature.  For there really is, as every one to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.  It is this that Sophocles’ Antigone clear mean when she says that the burial of Polyneices was a just act in spite of the prohibition: she means that it was just by nature.

                  Not of to-day or yesterday it is,

                  But lives eternal: none can date its birth.

                                             (Sophocles, Antigone, 456-7)

and of COURSE as I cite THAT PASSAGE the “Eternity” jam opens up from the 12/10/93 show where I am streaming…flowing.  Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) "everything flows".  --  listen to Branford and Jerry trading licks!!! --  [Weir wrote “Eternity” with Willie Dixon…bluesman extraordinaire, whom Weir called “a true genius.”]   “Love won’t ever die, won’t ever die, love won’t ever die.” Lives eternal.

[nb: I need to return to one of the fundamental claims I made in my 10/2/14 Heraclitus lecture when I insinuated that the East/West divide collapses with the thinking of Heraclitus.  I know Heidegger would have nothing of that assertion.  Nevertheless, I need to come to back to that.]

Chuang Tzu brings me back to the originary disclosure via the Law of Nature, the universal law, and does so by reminding us that the nature of that Law of nature: “Nature is not only spontaneity but nature is the state of constant flux and incessant transformation.  This is the universal process that all binds all things into one, equalizing all things and all opinions.  The pure man make this oneness his eternal abode, in which he becomes a ‘companion’ of Nature and does not attempt to interfere with it by imposing the way of man on it.  His goal is absolute spiritual emancipation and peace, to be achieved through knowing the capacity and limitations of one’s own nature, nourishing it, and adapting it to the universal process of transformation…Having gained enlightenment through the light of Nature, he moves in the realm of ‘great knowledge’ and ‘profound virture.’  Thus he is free.”(BL 317)

I can feel  ‘ceaseless nativity’ is ready to burst on the scene!  On 12/20/14 a day after the excursus back to the East, where I had spent a good deal of the…

-       [ I AM NOT MAKING THIS  UP:  but just now when I looked up from my screen I saw that my hour glass had stopped…REALLY?!??! C’mon!...What are those lyrics from  William Blake?:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

         And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

         And Eternity in an hour.”

Or, maybe, Robert Hunter's: “Once in awhile you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right!”] –

12/20/04 begins with by describing poetic dialogue as “the restless process of learning.”  Restless because it is enacting the Law of Nature, which is now understood as the force that guides (steers) via rapture.  Learning is the restless process that moves with the originary ‘state of constant flux and incessant transformation.  This is the universal process that binds all things into one…’  Restless both in the sense of constant movement, in the sense of being unsettled, but more importantly because it caught within the logic of spontaneity and improvisation. 

On 12/20/04, learning is the modality described as the attunement “with the Being of existence,” which is a totally new way of phrasing the relationship between Being and learning.  ‘Being of existence’ emphasizes the originary disclosure as a primal dynamic flow.  We reach the juncture where there is no further reduction, and the description becomes both a repetition and reiteration of what has already been writing, and in this sense the writing is decisively mimetic, and then implodes at the moment where the prosaic is saturated by the poetic and can no longer bear the weight of memory.   The phenomenological is laid bare and amongst the fragments that are strewn in the meditation: “Poetic dialogue is precisely the ‘saying’ of the singular that celebrates the freedom preserved and spared by Being’s…Way….we are identifying the musicality of the aesthetic state, and the musicality of the artistic mediation that expresses the attunement of Being’s dynamic flow.  To learn is to be attuned to this flow, to be en-raptured by the hearing of Being’s hidden harmony.  To be a ‘companion’ of Being is to enter into a poetic dialogue with Being, to be en-chanted and thus attuned to the modality of Being’s spontaneity.”(BL 318)

For the past two days I’ve wanted to write something about a brief moment in Gutierrez, about six pages that include the three sections: Creation: the First Salvific Action, Political Liberation: Self-Creation of Man, Salvation: Re-Creation and Complete Fulfillment.   For Gutierrez creation and salvation become unified in Christ, because, as Paul (Rom. 8) wrote, creation acquires its full meaning.  But what does ‘full meaning’ constitute if not the fulfillment of the original promise made in the Covenant.  Gutierrez reads backwards from Christ to Exodus and the liberation from Egypt “linked to and even coinciding with creation, adds an element of capital importance: the need and place for man’s active participation in the building of society…By working, transforming the world, breaking out of servitude, building a just society, and assuming his destiny in history, man forges himself…The liberating initiative of Yahweh responds to this need by stirring up Moses’ vocation.  Only the mediation of this self-creation – first revealed in the liberation from Egypt – allows us to rise above poetic expressions and general categories and to understand in a profound and synthesizing way the relationship between creation and salvation so vigorously proclaimed by the Bible.”(158-159)  Beyond the poetic, the phenomenological, thinking, learning, and all ‘self-creation’ is a transcendence to a more challenging, more daunting, more rigorous work of building justice, a work propelled by force of the Spirit that is gathered through silence.  Thus the mediation happens by way of profound, painstaking compassionate listening.  How else would Moses have heard the call of Yahweh?

“Inspiration, move me brightly,

like the song of sense and color,

holding away despair.

More than this I will not ask,

faced with mysteries dark and vast…”