Satori

It is best when discussing reality to avoid romanticized terms. Mysterious meanings are detrimental to productive discourse, and words buggered by generations of dilettantes and poseurs are difficult to use effectively. Though it often seems those who use the word “enlightenment” should have their mouths washed out with soap, it must be admitted that satori is a factual potential in the repertoire of human experience.

Followed back far enough the word Zen translates roughly to meditation. But the fact of Zen as it exists is predicated upon an event known as satori, and it is satori that has historically given Zen its unique flavor in the chocolate shop of spiritual discipline.

Satori is not the property of Zen. It is not unheard of that epiphanies of seismic proportions occur in minds that have never heard the word “satori”, never considered courting enlightenment, and in minds that couldn't care less. The thread upon which enlightenment events are strung is preparation. Preparation might be willed or unwilled, negative or positive, solitary confinement or consummate freedom: preparation is the first requisite. But a properly kindled stove needs the right spark: satori is a spontaneous event that no amount of preparation can provoke on its own. The laid up fire is a reasonable analogy. Kindling and heat-wood may sit unlit until the sun explodes: a spark is necessary. Any element inadequate, and an entire box of matches will not suffice. Soggy wood and the kindling flares briefly and in vain. Insufficient kindling and the once in a lifetime spark sparks in vain: blah, blah, blah.

The event resembles a river that in flooding cuts a new, very real, simpler course through its erstwhile meandering path. Thought travels shorter distances to traverse the same territory. Mind infuses a human vehicle, and is found identified with all that the brain requires of “human experience.” Mind in a dog is trapped in a dog experience: there is Mind, there is dog; there is dog mind. There is a bird brain in a bird, and therefore a bird mind. It is rare, but it does happen in humans, that Mind experiences something like an alignment of normally opposing polarizing lenses and the light (there all along) floods through.

Satori is is not technically a spiritual opening: satori is a physical change in the way the brain is inhabited by Awareness.

The Quality of Mercy

Mercy is a human quality that may exist as psychological tropism, which is to say as a spontaneous reaction to the experience of empathy. Perhaps this explains the behavior of the merciless, if so it would justify their elimination from the gene pool. The quality of mercy is one of mankind’s few redeeming features, and it would be a very good thing if it were consciously cultivated in our children in place of the current cultivation of the competitive imperative. Almost everywhere we see something good happening as a product of human intent, mercy is a quality of that goodness. And everyday the news is dominated by the behavior of the merciless.

Compassion is an experience, empathy is an emotion; mercy is an act. Mercy is an exercise of will in intended beneficence. And outside of mercy entering into the cumulative will of human-kind our children are assured to inherit a hell world.

Dignity and Posture

Much remarkable work is being done today in the study of animal social dynamics. The dynamic of these interactions includes more than just inter-specie behavior, for intra-specie transactions are the very stuff of which ecosystems are woven. Human social dynamics resemble more the “intra” than the “inter” when it comes to specie watching; for amongst us, the lions and the water buffalo exist in analogue full-fledged configuration (not to mix a metaphor), and pecking orders exist intra and inter. The ins and outs of who can dis whom and with what degree of subtlety differ not in kind or quality in the human being than any barnyard or pristine jungle animal. We see it everywhere in every social circumstance: in church, in business, on the highways, and in the interactions between alleged “friends.” Almost everywhere we look we find a dearth of genuine self-importance, and a maneuvering for limited resources of social position. It is as much a part of the human animal as breathing, and as unpleasant to deal with as walking barefoot through a feedlot. We can count ourselves lucky if in our lives there exists a small handful of people in whose presence we do not have to be on guard. It seems to me posturing is so germane to the human creature that it is intra-specie invisible, and were it not for "manners" and mechanical acquiescence to social convention the Hieronymus-Boschian reality would be apparent to even the most hoplessly occluded. It is as if leg-humping dogs were so ubiquitous as to be accepted, and therefore not entering into notice. We find our place in this fray to our weal or our woe taking it all personally, and if by some unfortunate surfeit of awareness we should recognize the movement we are still trapped in its sway.

It has to do with a fragile sense of dignity, and a primitive territorial imperative. If we do not take up the space that is properly our own someone else most certainly will, and if we do not extend to others the dignity of their own confusion then there can be no dignity at all.

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Getting by in Buzzard Land


In lieu of conversation
The sound of concomitant rending
Tearing
Of some dead thing

There is no malice
This is just what buzzards do
And is the result and intent of their dramatic overview


If you wish to be left alone in buzzard land
Merely demonstrate that you’re alive

If you wish to get close to one
Play dead



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Toward a Theory of Mind

It seems quite remarkable that so little is known about Mind. We have the science of psychology, and we have the recent ability to observe electrical activities in the brain; but nothing is known considering the fact of experience. The fact that photons striking the optic nerve result in what is known as sight, the fact that shock waves propagating through atmosphere result in the creaturely experience known as sound; these (and all) elements of what is known as experience are wholly mysterious. 

It seems to me that experience implies an experiencing matrix. There are conflicting religious doctrines about souls and such, but there is the obvious fact that were there not an experience generative event exhibiting singularity that was somewhat motionless in the flux of time, there could be no point of reference about which an experience could accrue. I think that this “motionless in time” feature is a place to look for what we can know about mind simply because it is self evident. 

Time seems to be the invention of Mind. The event that is the existence of the universe appears to be a seething present of accidental inevitable elements possessing trajectories. Trajectories make the universe predictable if a mind exists to do the math, but outside of Mind there is just the fact of existence with no past, present, or future: and therefore no meaning.

Meaning is a temporal event that can only be generated from the outside; which is to say from a standpoint of relative motionlessness vis-à-vis the trajectory-bound non-moment of now.

One difficulty in the quest for a theory of Mind is the complication presented by the human nature of the mind that would busy itself with such pointless trivialities. It is natural that human-ness would be invisible to the human mind, for otherwise, as in the classic millipede story, normal activity would require more conscious regulation than is conceivable. At the same time here we have place to start. Can it be otherwise than that human-ness is something that happens to Mind because of Mind’s existence in a human brain? The brain is a physical form necessitating, which is to say making inevitable, certain forms of experiencing; this includes intellectual, emotional and physical experiencing. These experiencings are “I feel” for the individual mind: but for it’s existence the experience could not be made inevitable. We are postulating mind not as a spiritual property, but Mind as an inevitable epiphenomenona of certain material arrangements that perhaps “wake-up” space or something: hell, I don’t know.