Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 07:22:55 +1000
From: David Quinn <davidquinn-AT-ozemail.com.au>
Subject: Re: Tao, paradox, heraclitus


Ariosto wrote:
 
>DQ:
>> Any tension perceived in the Tao is an illusion
>> created by a person's limited understanding.   There is no tension in the
>> Tao at all, because, in the end, the opposites are illusory.   So when a
>> person opens his mind up to enlightenment, he goes beyond the opposites and
>> tunes into the Source of everything.  He no longer experiences any form of
>> tension - neither emotional nor conceptual.   
>
>  I think, in  so far as enlightnment, a disclosive illumination, is
>not  something that comes easily but requires an opening of   the mind
>then I  would like to know how this openess, tuning operates? I'm
>interest in  thinking  about the mechanics rather than jumping to
>conclusions and making statements from there. I  suggested that
>thinking is meditation and  whatever we takes this activity to be,
>however passive, would  a way of beginning in  understanding anything
>like the  opening of the mind.  

Absolutely.   Thinking (i.e. the passionate use of logic and reasoning) is
the driving force of any progress towards enlightenment.  

As far as the "mechanics" is concerned, the path to enlightenment is
two-fold.  Firstly, there is the intellectual side - i.e. the process of
slowly perfecting one's intellectual understanding of Reality.  And
secondly, there is the devotional side - i.e. the process of giving oneself
over to this intellectual understanding, allowing it to infiltrate every
nook and cranny of one's being, and thereby allowing it to slowly alter
one's mind so that it begins to reflect more and more the nature of Reality.  

These two aspects have to be developed simultaneously, for at bottom there
can't be any progress in one without progress in the other.   Indeed, one's
intellectual understanding doesn't reach perfection until the moment of
enlightenment, and one cannot enter enlightenment without first having a
perfect (or near-perfect) intellectual understanding.   The two reach their
consummation together.


>> Don't forget, also, that there is a world of difference between a spiritual
>> paradox and a flat-out contradiction.   A spiritual paradox is something
>> which *seems* contradictory to the ignorant mind, but which is perfectly
>> reconcilable to the enlightened mind - e.g. the Zen koan.    A flat-out
>> contradiction, by contrast, is something which cannot be reconciled under
>> any circumstances at all - neither through ignorance, nor through
>> enlightenment - although ignorant people do have the capacity to ignore such
>> dilemmas through the judicious use of mental blocks.
>> 
>  Ignorance then for you involves the judicous use  of mental blocks,
>but again how does this concealment of light (Heidegger calls light
>'care') work  in ordinary, everyday,  unenlightened, ignorant
>consciousness? I suspect its  very natural and common,  the way that
>for the most  part nearly everyone thinks,  feels, imagines. 

Basically, it is people's attachments which create the mental blocks.   As a
crude example of this process, a woman might discover evidence that her
boyfriend, whom she is madly in love with, is sexually molesting her
seven-year old daughter.  However, because she is in love with him and wants
desperately to preserve the relationship, she is strongly motivated to sweep
all the evidence under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist.   This
sweeping under the carpet needn't happen consciously, of course.   Her
subconscious mind has more than enough capacity to do it for her - it can
create the appropriate mental blocks almost instantaneously, so that the
stage can quickly and easily be reached where the woman literally sees *no
evidence at all* that her boyfriend is behaving badly, even when it's
happening right under her nose.  

The same basic principle applies to people's everyday ignorance of Truth.
People have mental blocks about Truth because they have deep-seated
attachments which would be greatly threatened by a knowledge and an
awareness of Truth.  Some of these attachments include love, marriage,
woman, femininity, power,  pleasure, security, community status, desire for
approval, etc.   The average person is so deeply attached to all of these
things that it forces his mind to become distorted and twisted beyond all
recognition in order to accommodate them.  


>I  don't think for my part that divine
>thinking involves anything like a distinction between  enlightment and
>ignorance, it is beyond ordinary opposites words like  light and dark.
>If alway aiming towards a middle,  paradoxical course of thinking is
>adequate, or imitates in its equanimity the divine mind then  we need
>to come up with middle ways of  using language like enlightned
>ignorance or ignorant-enlightment. We start edging towards the limit of
>the English language and inventing if we have  to, terms that are a
>union  of  opposites,  neither  active nor passive and not  even, 
>perhaps both active and passive -  incomprehensible.

A better approach would be to keep the old words, and instead push and
expand our own inner understanding of them.  Creating new terms like
"enlightened ignorance" just creates unnecessary confusion and doesn't
really achieve anything.   There are already enough words in the English
language to adequately describe the Truth, and the path to enlightenment.
What's lacking in our society is the mental effort to understand the Truth,
not the words for describing it.  


>Seriously, I believe in rank, if I were to be  able  to do this and
>look at  my soul or mind as its director, I would say I am proficient
>beginner after 14 years of study,  seven of them with  passionate 
>obsession. I'm an ephebe, a neophyte barely grasping basic issues and
>problems, paradoxes, ambiguities,  etc. I'm at what  Spinoza would call
>the second level of knowledge, and  here barely. In an anonymous
>English mystical  treatise,  The Cloud of Unknowing, the term that  is 
>used for describing where I am, is a "cloud of forgetting" which is
>prerequisite for coming near a "cloud of  unknowing," a naked
>intentionality which allows neither for the light of understanding nor
>for the sweetness of love as an affection. This cloud points out,
>indicates a limit to our knowledge of the divine life, it is the
>resistance of what remains hidden, and secret. At most we can look
>through the cloud of unknowing with a "ghostly eye".

Allow me to put this into plain English so that we can see if I'm
understanding you correctly:   You're not really certain of anything at all.
You think you may be close to enlightenment, but you're not sure.    On the
other hand, you could be a million miles away from enlightenment, but again
you're not sure.   You're not even sure whether enlightenment is possible,
or even desirable.  You seem to perceive inherent limitations in human
understanding, particularly in its capacity to understand Ultimate Reality,
but again you can't be sure that this perception isn't an illusion of some
kind.   It seems to you that the best we can do is grasp vaguely at Reality
and understand it in a kind of intuitive manner, but again you're not sure.
And so on.    Is that fairly close?  


>You seem not to be concerned with  public
>shame, I admire that although saying  that women are incapable of being
>devoted to divine ways in a hardcore manner is  just plain ignorant.
>Look at Santa Teresa for instance.

Who's she?

Incidently, since you've already admitted that you aren't enlightened, that
you're just a neophyte, etc, how do you actually know that my comments on
women are "plain ignorant".   In other words, on what basis have you decided
that a person like Santa Teresa, whoever she may be, has any connection with
enlightenment at all?    I think you'll find that you're involving yourself
in a logical contradiction of your own here.


David Quinn