OPM 231(32), October 3rd (2004 & 2014) Meditation, Being and Learning, pp. 226-227

First time back in Saint’s Café, State College, PA, in a very long time.  It was here,  in this café, back in November 2011 that I completed the Foreword to Being and Learning, the last piece of writing that I would do before the publication of the selected meditations from the year of daily writing that I am commemorating ten years later.  This is the first time the book has been in Saint’s, so I’ve taken a commemorative photo, which includes the little black Moleskine that I first purchased from Kate’s Paperie on 13^th Street, around the corner from 65 Fifth Avenue.  I was on my way to 65 Fifth to attend the Arendt/Schürmann symposium.   I haven’t used that Moleskine in exactly two years, with the last note being made in October, 2012 when I was at Joe Café on the Columbia U campus.   For some reason I made a point of putting the Moleskine in my backpack this morning as I was gathering my stuff for this trip to State College.  And for some reason when I sat down to write my daily  commemorative commentary I opened up the Moleskine and what I discovered were notes that could have been written this past summer 2014, a solid seven years after I was coming into the place of what on 01.17.07 I called “my turn toward eco-logy,” which is a nice complement to huacaslogical.   A week earlier on 01.09.07 while I was teaching a Jan intersession grad course I wrote the following note:

Thinking is a heteronomous experience.

Thinking is an activity that receives.

Thinking is an activity of reflection.

Thinking throws light upon.

Thinking reveals, shows, indicates.

Thinking dwells in the eternal, the gap between past & future.

Thinking shows the Way but can not insist that one take up the Path.

A month later on 02.07.07 I was in Crawford Notch with my daughter Zsofie, at the AMC Highland Center and I wrote the following note:

I am peace with this situation, this project I have embarked upon.  I do feel a heavy weight of responsibility as the enormous breadth and depth of resources, questions and possibilities opens before me, like the great mountains and forests themselves.  Here I am reminded that Dwelling is a passivity of listening, learning to listen to Nature, to be-with Nature. 

And on 03.22.07 in conversation with Schürmann’s work:

Prof. Schürmann describes thinking as historical-ahistorical, economic-logical [phenomenological].  Herein lies the origin as multiple.

Could we, perhaps, identify eco-logical thinking as spiritual/natural?

Eco > oikos,  eco-nomic, oikos-nomos, oikos-legein –to gather

to be gathered into a new home; a new ‘world’?

The final note I will share (there a many more that I want to share because they show me how both the continuity and the evolution of my work in the time in-between the completion of the daily writing experiment I am revisiting this year and the publication of that material).   On 03.26.07 I underline precisely what I emphasized yesterday: the educational imperative, i.e., thinking as the practice of learning close listening; and this learning as happening in the gathering of koinonia.  

Learning to Dwell must be related to the Dwelling of teaching –

Ø in ‘363’ there is a constant reference to the teacher as the fecund ground that preserves possibility.  How & where does one learn this dwelling?

Ø It might be argued that this learning to dwell, which we shouldn’t overcomplicate, is both related to our relation with the Earth and with one another – in other words, this learning, which I want to suggest takes place in the Wilderness, is a kind of learning that yields a kind of teaching, a perspective and a position: it is this position that I am most interested in exploring & writing about.

How might ‘Pan’ get this work underway? (cf. ‘363’ 4701.03.02)

At that time the collection of meditations that were ultimately published as Being and Learning were alternatively referred to as ‘363’, or the number of meditations I had completed in the experiment.  [As I noted at the very beginning of this commemorative project, at the end of the experiment I miscalculated the total number, having forgotten that 2004 was a leap year!  The total number was ‘364’] 

The meditation from this day ten years ago shows the strong commitment to the transcendental, specifically, the vertical move.   It seems inconsistent with the trajectory of the previous meditations that have focused on Zarathustra’s descent.   It seems as if I experienced my own ‘hesitation’ – described in the previous days – toward the movement to the ground and to others.   What takes precedence on 10.03.04 is the seizure of ordinary logic by “the vista that conveys the beyond.”(BL 226)  Such a vista could only be experienced from a height, such as the one we experienced last Saturday on the peak of Mt. Tom, which offers dramatic views from the highest pitch of Crawford Notch. 

 The seizure that draws one into this height happens with the “seizing of the learner by the sublime.”   But we immediately encounter a resolution to what appears, at first, as a transcendental abandonment of the ground: “what is striking is the strange phenomenal quality of the sublime as an indeterminate that presents itself to the imagination, circumventing the definite nature of calculating reason.”(BL 226)   Rather than abandoning the ground, the seizure of the sublime offers us a ‘lofty’ perspective of the phenomenal, of Nature.  This perspective is named ‘speculation’.   “The sublime seizes the ‘ordinary’ logic that masters the here-and-now and with this seizing en-opens the horizon of ‘pure’ speculation.  By ‘pure’ speculation we allude to the detachment occurring with the seizure that irrupts the ordinary and disrupts the ‘normal’ proceedings of everyday experience.”  Is the sublime analogous to or synonymous to the open region?  It seems to be a synonym, but actually works as a quality of the open.  The en-opening experienced in the open region happens by way of the sublime.  Recalling what was learned from Schürmann, it’s important to emphasize the sublime as one of a limited number of qualities of the open, which has multiple origins.

Speculation is thus an elevated perspective of the phenomenal that is experienced with the movement into the open, the seizure that leaves us in what Garcia calls the state of ‘being high’: we are seized by the sublime and held aloft.  “Speculation is the ‘beholding’ comportment of being-held, of being carried away to the most lofty.”(BL 226-227) Speculation as ‘being-high’ is a “reception of the ‘most lofty or exalted nature, characterized by grandeur, nobility or majesty inspiring awe’…the noble-mindedness of mindfulness, the openness of the heart to the arrival of the strange, the unexpected, the unpredictable. This loftiness of mindfulness is conveyed with the awe inspired by the sublime as wholly other…the be-holding of the extra-ordinary, the indeterminate, and the ineffable…and thus Kant identifies the sublime as ‘a representation of limitless.’”(BL 227)