Bringing It All Back Home

"Bringing it all back home"? Well, not really - not if the journey itself is home. Yet, thinking about it, the words are not entirely without sense.

I was looking back at the beginning of all my blogs and read again how Dogen spoke of the mind - of the mind not as thoughts and concepts, but as "trees, fence posts, tiles and grasses." It made me understand more another teaching of Dogen, that when we approach the "10,000 things" we are deluded, but when they are allowed to come to us we are enlightened. 

As I see it, what all this is about is the need to walk and look and see the world, whereas, alas, we can bury our head in a map. Our "self" has mapped it all out and we see only that which we have been conditioned to see. Our mind is full of concepts and thoughts and therefore the world about us is in fact never seen. As one wit has said, we choose to have the menu and leave the feast uneaten. 

Menu or the feast itself?

I wonder what it is that breaks us out of our shell. Perhaps one necessary step is the recognition that we are in fact in one! I think this is why Buddhism insists that our life is totally one of suffering, dukkha. In another context, another Faith, no one not conscious of sin will seek a saviour. 

Well, back to bringing it all back home, and thinking through this entire series of blogs. While rambling and waffling, I have also been reading, playing the guitar, reading, enjoying the grandchildren, and reading. While reading I often transfer passages to my cyberspace Notebook as they strike me. As a prelude to this attempt to put a lid upon these blogs (at least for the time being) I have returned to my Notebook and read through several of the jottings. Is there a theme amid my ramblings and notes? Can I capture one round of the spiral that can be called a journey and that can also be called home? Probably not. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I do see that the grounding is Faith. Trust. Not "belief". 

Basically I believe nothing. Just how passive can you get? But Wittgenstein once spoke of a state of mind that "perhaps others have known", of feeling absolutely safe, with the thought that nothing can hurt you. That is as close as I can get to faith as I know it, and strangely I do not see it as contradicting the essence of the Pure Land verse:- 

Whether heading for the Pure Land

 or falling to hell,

 all is in Amida's hands.

 Namu-amida-butsu! 

There is a little phrase of Saint Anselm of Canterbury contained in his "proofs" of God's existence. He spoke of "faith seeking understanding". I'm not really interested in his proofs, but I have some empathy with the idea of faith seeking understanding. So I ask just why on earth should I feel safe? 

Safe........but keep the hat ready?

Am I in some form of fool's paradise, a product purely of good fortune, resting in, and satisfied by, a contentment untested by fire? It could well be so, yet I cannot deliberately go and seek bad fortune to find if "my anchor holds". 

Moving on, another theme that figures prominently in both blogs and notebook is non-dualism, which is embarrassing in a way, given the discussions I have had in the past on various forums where I often argued with those who advocated it. Thinking back, perhaps some on those Forums expressed it badly, with one or two even saying equivalents of "the cypress tree in the garden" when attempting some sort of answer to my queries and objections. It does still seem to me that many understood the whole thing as "all is one" rather than that all is not two. Another thing entirely. 

Perhaps a Western version of "the cypress tree in the garden"

Looking into the thought and teachings of Dogen - or better, looking into the practice of Dogen - he sought a realistic affirmation and transformation of what was relative, finite, and temporal in a non-dualistic vision of the self and the world. He understood liberation not as a fixed form or static state, but as a flowing form or continuous activity of study, practice, and verification.

To understand duality lucidly and to penetrate it thoroughly within a nondualistic mode of existence was Dogen's final solution.

 Opposites or dualities were not obliterated or even blurred; they were not so much transcended as they were realized. 

(Both of the above from "Eihei Dogen - Mystical Realist" by Hee-Jin Kim)

Well, enough of that. I only insist that for myself I am seeking clarity, even seeking an understanding of faith. We each have our own path. My apologies if others only find a blurring from reading my ramblings.

My apologies

Having said that, I see also that I am often seeking, and in fact seeing and finding, a unity of understanding in the lives of others throughout time. A unity that is not the product of all being compelled to sing from the same hymn sheet, or a unity of a creedal formula, but of an existential search that always has its genesis in the living of a concrete human life in one particular time and place; a unity that finds "truth" not as a state (stasis) but as a dynamic, the unfolding of emptiness, an on-going creativity. Truth that is absolute only as an "appropriate statement of a whole lifetime", within the moment. 

And to add, part of my jottings draw upon a summary of how the ancient Greeks understood "truth".......never losing sight of wisdom, of a fuller understanding of life as a unified whole; a truth that included action, living well, and not just one of definitions and logical arguments. "The wise know that truth and goodness and beauty are inseparably unified". So thank you to the Greeks.

But no hymn sheet

Well, enough for now. What clarity I have must settle. Thank you.

Related Quotes:- 

Truth to tell, we do not know who we are - and that is who we are. 

(John Caputo, from "The Truth")

......truth is a form of life, not merely the property of a proposition. 

(John Caputo)

If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man. 

(Thomas Merton)

.....the modern mind engages the world within an explicit experiential structure of being a subject set apart from, and in some sense over against, an object. The modern world is full of objects, which the human subject confronts and acts upon from its unique position of conscious autonomy. By contrast, the primal mind engages the world more as a subject embedded in a world of subjects, with no absolute boundaries between or among them. In the primal perspective, the world is full of subjects. The primal world is saturated with subjectivity, interiority, intrinsic meanings and purposes.

(Richard Tarnas, from "Cosmos and Psyche")

As long as you remain in the dual extremes,

How can you know they're of one kind?

If you don't know they're of one kind,

You will lose efficacy in both realms....

......two exist because of one...

(Seng Ts'an, from "Poem on the True Mind")

..........the Buddhist doctrine of means in which the means in question is not transcendence of duality but realization of it.

(Hee-Jin Kim, on Dogen)