I doubt (fail to “feel”) very much that at “our center” there is “stillness”.
What may be at our “center” is ‘being”, but being cannot be stillness anymore than it can be violence though it so often may “feel” like one or another except that it can also feel like so many experiences that are not even on the gradation between “stillness and violence” or “peace and dynamism” because there are so many other axes and so many other planes and so many other multi dimensional entities that exist even beyond our imagination though they are all part of us just as we are all part of whatever they are (and aren’t).
It (being) can’t even be “becoming” because that is “us” when we find ourselves approaching some sensation of of “everything, everywhere, all at once” and “no thing, no where, and the forever, never ending now” that stretches us out far past imaginary boundaries.
And i”being” can’t be at our “center” because all of that is so far beyond any sense of self that we can’t maintain it and should never mistake the resonating aftermath of the sensation of “approaching it” for it (being) because that resonating aftermath can’t be the same as the sensation — and that sensation was only the sensation of an “approach that could never be “resolved” even if we find ways to “feel” satisfied with that lack.
But it’s probably true that at the center of our self there is “all of us” in the sense of Joyce’s “here comes everybody” (and everything and no thing else) — and it’s also probably true that what we think of as “becoming” is the movement from approaching this expansive sense of including “the all” that is also including us (like the snake swallowing its tail while also giving birth to itself or the M. C. Escher pair of hands drawing and erasing one another.
But then again, I surely have misread you just like I misread myself and misunderstand so much that we might as well call it “Everything”. And we’re left backward and inside out, gasping, and wondering if there might be some “science” (logos) for the posing of absurd questions and our attempts to relate them to imaginary solutions.
(Just another way of saying, I’m no good at meditation…)
Perhaps stillness is the wrong word. Try acceptance. Probably no better, because how can you use a word to describe a non-verbal experience? I chose "stillness" because, on a good day, by sitting, I let go of the thoughts about what might go wrong, what I am looking forward to, and what happened yesterday, and am in better contact with what is.
My point in writing this was to say that there is a terrain of which we are usually unaware. Our attention lived there before we acquired language and we have probably not changed physiologically, but language masks it from us. I find that intriguing and barely acknowledged in today's culture.
Interesting. I KNOW I can sometimes feel a “stillness”.
It doesn’t last very long, but I’ve experienced it enough to know it’s “there,” that it’s also “here,” and that it is not merely a wish. But I can’t bring myself to think or feel that this stillness represents “being” or “truth” because “being” or “truth” seems (to me) to be “wholeness” or “oneness” or “unity”. And it does seem and feel (using LOGOS” here, I’m sure) that this oneness transcends any narrow sense of self in a way that is neither comforting nor frightening though my words might say that it may represent an annihilating acceptance and self-dissolving calm. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s not love in any sense I can grapple with, and I don’t love it.
Maybe it puts “things” (especially certain troubles and anxieties) in perspective. And I do feel I understand why some would say that “selfhood” or the “separateness of ‘things’” is an “illusion,” but I don’t find that useful on too many levels… because THAT “world of illusion” is where I live and (mal)function… and to say “I” will join the “calm” unity of wholeness once I die is to say something of little meaning for “me” as I am now.
***************************
“But if time is an illusion,” the Bullfrog retorted to the March Hare, “is simply to say I’m already a dead duck.”
“Duck?” cried Miss Lizard as she whipped an andiron directly at poor Froggy’s noggin. “I do not believe for one moment that your deep fried leg would ever taste like chicken no matter how much wine sauce I slathered over it!”
But the Bullfrog, without thinking (thanks be to the galaxy) dove deep into the lake and burrowed head first into the sameness of the bottom muck where he wintered mindlessly until orange daffodils popped and bloomed again near the sunny banks. And the March Hare, Miss Lizard and the Dodo Bird divvied up his biscuits at the very next tea time which was not too long in coming since it came every forty minutes on weekdays and at a slightly more relaxed pace on Sundays.
*****************************
Animals, without words, can experience calm and stillness just as they can experience joy, curiosity, terror, and many complex/contradictory emotions. They also have thoughts and concepts that are more than memories and recognitions of certain patterns either essential to biological survival or a part of the natural environment. But without language these other animals probably lack an ability to intentionally direct thoughts and actions towards novel habits that might foster some experiences/feelings that seem desirable and inhibit others that are experienced as “negatives”. (Not that most humans, or human societies, are especially successful at this, nevermind our inability to predict all the unintended consequences of our novelties.)
What other animals may share with us is a certain ocasional experience of undirected yearning or longing. This (I call it “Himera”) is different than the vague sense of dissatisfaction that can morph into anxiety which can then sometimes be directed by other urgencies that we might experience as angry/violent, procreative/erotic, empathic/nurturing, some combination of those, or odder mélanges also stirred by fear, curiosity, or even wonder. Undirected longing contains more wonder and sadness than dissatisfaction or anxiety, but everything is always there and none of these sensations can dominate a consciousness for too long whether a being is conscious of being conscious (the way a human can sometimes be) or not.
I’d rather call this “Himera” a base sensation rather than “calmness” or “acceptance’ (the latter being something that seems very ‘high-level’ in the sense that it often requires a great deal of experience and reflection upon that experience for it to be appreciated, if not attained). Still, it’s only more difficult to pin word based characterizations on undifferentiated yearning than on anger/violence/power, erotic desires to know/control/possess, or compassionate urges to protect/nurture/inspire. All of those contend with and seek to exploit the undifferentiated chaos of all being which always already ONLY presents itself in facets, waves, patterns, salients, openings, blankness, assaults, and gifts that only occasionally reveal that each of these “individual” parts (like the shards of a shattered holograph) contain every other part, face, or “fragment” as well as the entire multiverse of wholeness that our consciousness mostly serves to alienate from us.
Sorry to take so long to reply. Life has been busy.
In your first comment, you mention "all of us", and I think there is a good argument to be made that the nonverbal sense includes union, as opposed to language, which inherently classifies the world into "this" and "not this".
Writing about this is like the difference between naming the frequency of the color red and the experience of it, or reading a guidebook to Paris vs. visiting it.
I've written elsewhere about boundaries, and how they are never clear-cut (except in the case of mathematics), and likewise, the boundary between verbal and nonverbal is fuzzy. Poetry is taking words and using them like arrows to point to the nature of life that lies beyond language.
Right. And experiencing "being" is about as 'pataphysical as we can ever get since it implies experiencing what we ARE -- which includes experiencing (or reflecting upon) our experience. Words get at it partially and sequentially. Emotions thrum and morph into one another. They can subsume and are subsumed at the very same points in "time."
We can experience ocean waves as the light bouncing off of them, the sounds they make, or the force they exert on our bodies, but any one of those (or some other expression of ocean waves) can cause one of our senses to overwhelm the others or even overwhelm ALL our limited sentience completely (and not just in the mortal way the waves might submerge us physically.)
I doubt (fail to “feel”) very much that at “our center” there is “stillness”.
What may be at our “center” is ‘being”, but being cannot be stillness anymore than it can be violence though it so often may “feel” like one or another except that it can also feel like so many experiences that are not even on the gradation between “stillness and violence” or “peace and dynamism” because there are so many other axes and so many other planes and so many other multi dimensional entities that exist even beyond our imagination though they are all part of us just as we are all part of whatever they are (and aren’t).
It (being) can’t even be “becoming” because that is “us” when we find ourselves approaching some sensation of of “everything, everywhere, all at once” and “no thing, no where, and the forever, never ending now” that stretches us out far past imaginary boundaries.
And i”being” can’t be at our “center” because all of that is so far beyond any sense of self that we can’t maintain it and should never mistake the resonating aftermath of the sensation of “approaching it” for it (being) because that resonating aftermath can’t be the same as the sensation — and that sensation was only the sensation of an “approach that could never be “resolved” even if we find ways to “feel” satisfied with that lack.
But it’s probably true that at the center of our self there is “all of us” in the sense of Joyce’s “here comes everybody” (and everything and no thing else) — and it’s also probably true that what we think of as “becoming” is the movement from approaching this expansive sense of including “the all” that is also including us (like the snake swallowing its tail while also giving birth to itself or the M. C. Escher pair of hands drawing and erasing one another.
But then again, I surely have misread you just like I misread myself and misunderstand so much that we might as well call it “Everything”. And we’re left backward and inside out, gasping, and wondering if there might be some “science” (logos) for the posing of absurd questions and our attempts to relate them to imaginary solutions.
(Just another way of saying, I’m no good at meditation…)
Perhaps stillness is the wrong word. Try acceptance. Probably no better, because how can you use a word to describe a non-verbal experience? I chose "stillness" because, on a good day, by sitting, I let go of the thoughts about what might go wrong, what I am looking forward to, and what happened yesterday, and am in better contact with what is.
My point in writing this was to say that there is a terrain of which we are usually unaware. Our attention lived there before we acquired language and we have probably not changed physiologically, but language masks it from us. I find that intriguing and barely acknowledged in today's culture.
Interesting. I KNOW I can sometimes feel a “stillness”.
It doesn’t last very long, but I’ve experienced it enough to know it’s “there,” that it’s also “here,” and that it is not merely a wish. But I can’t bring myself to think or feel that this stillness represents “being” or “truth” because “being” or “truth” seems (to me) to be “wholeness” or “oneness” or “unity”. And it does seem and feel (using LOGOS” here, I’m sure) that this oneness transcends any narrow sense of self in a way that is neither comforting nor frightening though my words might say that it may represent an annihilating acceptance and self-dissolving calm. It’s not good. It’s not bad. It’s not love in any sense I can grapple with, and I don’t love it.
Maybe it puts “things” (especially certain troubles and anxieties) in perspective. And I do feel I understand why some would say that “selfhood” or the “separateness of ‘things’” is an “illusion,” but I don’t find that useful on too many levels… because THAT “world of illusion” is where I live and (mal)function… and to say “I” will join the “calm” unity of wholeness once I die is to say something of little meaning for “me” as I am now.
***************************
“But if time is an illusion,” the Bullfrog retorted to the March Hare, “is simply to say I’m already a dead duck.”
“Duck?” cried Miss Lizard as she whipped an andiron directly at poor Froggy’s noggin. “I do not believe for one moment that your deep fried leg would ever taste like chicken no matter how much wine sauce I slathered over it!”
But the Bullfrog, without thinking (thanks be to the galaxy) dove deep into the lake and burrowed head first into the sameness of the bottom muck where he wintered mindlessly until orange daffodils popped and bloomed again near the sunny banks. And the March Hare, Miss Lizard and the Dodo Bird divvied up his biscuits at the very next tea time which was not too long in coming since it came every forty minutes on weekdays and at a slightly more relaxed pace on Sundays.
*****************************
Animals, without words, can experience calm and stillness just as they can experience joy, curiosity, terror, and many complex/contradictory emotions. They also have thoughts and concepts that are more than memories and recognitions of certain patterns either essential to biological survival or a part of the natural environment. But without language these other animals probably lack an ability to intentionally direct thoughts and actions towards novel habits that might foster some experiences/feelings that seem desirable and inhibit others that are experienced as “negatives”. (Not that most humans, or human societies, are especially successful at this, nevermind our inability to predict all the unintended consequences of our novelties.)
What other animals may share with us is a certain ocasional experience of undirected yearning or longing. This (I call it “Himera”) is different than the vague sense of dissatisfaction that can morph into anxiety which can then sometimes be directed by other urgencies that we might experience as angry/violent, procreative/erotic, empathic/nurturing, some combination of those, or odder mélanges also stirred by fear, curiosity, or even wonder. Undirected longing contains more wonder and sadness than dissatisfaction or anxiety, but everything is always there and none of these sensations can dominate a consciousness for too long whether a being is conscious of being conscious (the way a human can sometimes be) or not.
I’d rather call this “Himera” a base sensation rather than “calmness” or “acceptance’ (the latter being something that seems very ‘high-level’ in the sense that it often requires a great deal of experience and reflection upon that experience for it to be appreciated, if not attained). Still, it’s only more difficult to pin word based characterizations on undifferentiated yearning than on anger/violence/power, erotic desires to know/control/possess, or compassionate urges to protect/nurture/inspire. All of those contend with and seek to exploit the undifferentiated chaos of all being which always already ONLY presents itself in facets, waves, patterns, salients, openings, blankness, assaults, and gifts that only occasionally reveal that each of these “individual” parts (like the shards of a shattered holograph) contain every other part, face, or “fragment” as well as the entire multiverse of wholeness that our consciousness mostly serves to alienate from us.
Sorry to take so long to reply. Life has been busy.
In your first comment, you mention "all of us", and I think there is a good argument to be made that the nonverbal sense includes union, as opposed to language, which inherently classifies the world into "this" and "not this".
Writing about this is like the difference between naming the frequency of the color red and the experience of it, or reading a guidebook to Paris vs. visiting it.
I've written elsewhere about boundaries, and how they are never clear-cut (except in the case of mathematics), and likewise, the boundary between verbal and nonverbal is fuzzy. Poetry is taking words and using them like arrows to point to the nature of life that lies beyond language.
Right. And experiencing "being" is about as 'pataphysical as we can ever get since it implies experiencing what we ARE -- which includes experiencing (or reflecting upon) our experience. Words get at it partially and sequentially. Emotions thrum and morph into one another. They can subsume and are subsumed at the very same points in "time."
We can experience ocean waves as the light bouncing off of them, the sounds they make, or the force they exert on our bodies, but any one of those (or some other expression of ocean waves) can cause one of our senses to overwhelm the others or even overwhelm ALL our limited sentience completely (and not just in the mortal way the waves might submerge us physically.)