Well, what is the point of extending our vocabulary day by day, weighing ourselves down with new words, thoughts and ideas? Possibly no point whatsoever. But sometimes my own mind drifts to the story of the Jewish scholar who, awaiting his execution in the morning, nevertheless sits studying the Talmud until late into the night.
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| A Jewish Scholar though perhaps not awaiting execution |
(Or is it the story of the man who sermonises of the world's end on the morrow who is spied that night planting his next crop of vegetables? Not sure. But no matter)
Does there have to be a point? If Meister Eckhart is correct in saying that love has no why does there have to be a point in extending our vocabulary, any particular point to any learning? Musing further, possibly we all have our own mental map of "things that are important" and "things that are not important". Ah yes; this is good, useful, valuable......whereas that is bad, useless, worthless. And so with all things, and people too. Dogen had something relevant to say on all this, that flowers fade no matter that we think them beautiful, while weeds grow even though we dislike them. This has its affinities with the Pure Land saying that things are made to become so of themselves beyond our calculations.
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| Good advice - or not? |
Chiasmus and Kalogenic, two new words, at least for me. The dictionary definition of "chiasmus" ( ky-az-muz) is that it is a linguistic twist or turn that you can use to express a crosswise mode of thought, as in:-
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
Recently I was dipping into a book where the author sought to demonstrate that the concept of chiasmus "can be generalised so that it is not only a figure of speech but also, and more importantly, a figure of thought and a figure of reality."
In doing so he approached the thought, once again, of Dogen, a man I have been quite engrossed in lately, a man whose thought - like all - issued from his own concrete reality in time and space, from his own attempts to find meaning and significance within a limited time span of just one age and no other.
Onto "kalogenic", from kalos, the Greek word for beauty, and genesis, which of course means bringing into being. Many now are seeing that our reality is a Kalogenic Universe, in which we live and move and have our being. Maybe to see this we must needs think crosswise and not simply align our thought to a simple linear progression. Then again, there can be a linear progression of some sorts. An example of our Kalogenic Universe is the butterfly, as mentioned by Hyatt Carter in one of his many little books. The butterfly, or the mariposa in Spanish, or again, a dealbhan-de in Gaelic, which translates as "Fire of God". Here we have some images of the butterfly.....
Which here is the weed and which the flower? This can possibly show just how limited our own judgements can be when our minds seek to stand still within a world of becoming.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless:
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
(T S Eliot, lines from Four Quartets)
The still point of the turning world
The still point of the turning world - again
John Keats once said that if something was not beautiful then it could not be true. He also spoke of "negative capability", the ability to live with uncertainties and mysteries and doubts, "without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
For now, I must go. Just two more images to finish.....of two modes of thought, one of letting things BE, and one of "calculation":-
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