wandering and wondering
about east and west
A good day to you all,
I have just returned from a ten day meditation retreat.
It was quite nourishing.
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
In the absence of a grain of sand, let’s peer into the universe in a drop of British water first:
Silence, then, the topic must be, no?
No.
A few days back (at the mediation centre), I witnessed some magnificent sunrises and sunsets, and the following thought struck me during a meditation (I guess I wasn’t really meditating):
What if the difference between Eastern and Western philosophy can be explained by the sun. Or, more specifically, by a categorical difference of thinking within us, exemplified and externalized in a sunrise or sunset.
That is quite incomprehensible.
Let me explain:
What if, when Man was waking up some million years ago somewhere in Africa, after watching multiple millions of magnificent sunrises and sunsets, slowly, two categories of early human beings emerged and went their own ways:
The one, forever intrigued in first beginnnigs, in origins.
The other, always interested in what comes next, where it all leads to.
Wouldn’t it make sense for the first category, the newly awakened mind intrigued by beginnings, to go to where the sun appears, to the east, to find its origin? The sun, the light and life bringer, the ultimate visible cause. What is the cause of the cause? Wanna find out? Go east!
And how could the childlike wandering mind, yearning for adventure and exploration, not go after that flaming ball in the sky that gives light, but forever goes out of sight, to the west. Where is he off to? What comes next? An explorer has no choice but to follow it, right?
And then, following our deepest questions on life, being, the universe and everything else, we head all the way east, all the way west, and end up with two different cultures based on these questions.
All this is probably very untrue and has no basis in scientific thought, but it is where the mind wandered.
Bad meditating!
For, as the teacher reminded us again and again:
‘Feeling, feeling, no thinking!’
Let’s see where this letter, with its origins in (bad) meditating (an Eastern practice, I might add), leads us. A wondering, wandering mind has no place in meditation. So, where to go?
From the book ‘Being a Human’ by Charles Foster:
Here's the manifesto. To be human: relate - and not just to living humans but to dead humans too, and to non-humans. To be human: believe that you will endure. To be human: wander.
All right, relating, enduring and wandering.
Ok, now what?
There!
Zen pops up.
I guess it leads us to meditation after all.
The book ‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind’ by Shunryu Suzuki, one of the Zen classics of the 20th century, says (find the quote at the 2:21:31 point):
There is no certain way that exists permanently. There is no way set up for us. Moment after moment we have to find our own way. Some idea of perfection or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us. Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through you understand everything. When you will try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone and no one can help you. To be independent in this true sense we have to forget everything which we have in our mind and discover something quite new and different, moment after moment. This is how we live in this world.
Here, the way is not towards somewhere, but into oneself. The age old adage ‘Know Thyself.’ Want to understand the world? Don’t head out or off, rather, go inside. Really inside. If you gain insight in yourself , mysteriously, you gain insight into the world and the universe.
Know Thyself indeed.
I will probably write a letter on this aphorism, inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece, but that’s for later. But why not take a quick peek into the importance of peeking into ourselves by peeking into some quotes of thinkers famous for peeking into themselves:
Plotinus:
Withdraw into yourself and look.
Theologia Germanica:
Thoroughly to know oneself, is above all art, for it is the highest art.
Paracelsus:
Men do not know themselves, and therefore they do not understand the things of their inner world. Each man has (…) all the wisdom and power of the world (germinally) in himself.
From India, Swaini Ramdas:
‘Seek within - know thyself’, these secret and sublime hints comes to us wafted from the breath of Rishis through the dust of ages.
From Islam, Azid ibn Muhammad al-Nasafi:
When Ali asked Mohammad, ‘What am I to do that I may not waste my time?’ the prophet answered, ‘Learn to Know Thyself.’
And from China, the Tao te Ching:
He who knows others is wise;
He who knows himself is enlightened.
And on and on it goes, also through Shakespeare, but more on that, perhaps, probably, later.
Returning now to the westward wanderers, the ones following the sun along the great American plains, chasing whatever there may be, way up high, over the rainbow.
In going there, let’s loosen the grips of history, and ease our way into a more free flowing breeze of unseen possibilities. Who knows, true spirit might run so subtly through history that outward appearances might be very different (or even contrary) to the undercurrents of the soul. In my own life at least, I have found this to be true, at times.
Some music, for the journey ahead:
(For those interested in some actual history, here are some tidbits about early California. Interesting aside: ‘California’ was (obviously) first inhabited by native Americans, who, intriguingly enough, found their way to ‘California’ in from the east. So, do they have similar origin-seeking-minds as the other ‘easterners’?)
OK!
California. 19th century. Gold! Rush! Go!
There they go, venturing towards that final, western frontier, just like the alchemists, hoping to find gold in stone, literally (and possibly figuratively). Forever west, following that most ancient first father the sun, towards whatever is behind that ever distant horizon.
Walking, wondering, wandering. Then, coming up a hill, reaching the top of that hill, and there: the ocean. And just where water turns to air, of course, still, the horizon. There is no further west. This is it, the end point, and lo and behold, the sun just keeps going, the ‘final west’ forever out of reach.
So this is it, huh?
I mean, the climate ain’t bad.
After some mining, some sulking, some more mining, watching the forever out of reach sunset, it dawned on us: we have to find the endpoint in ourselves.
Hippies! Peace and love! There is no going further, it was within us all along! Let’s bring in some Eastern philosophy, song, dance and, and, and…. and then the world and hippie slowly returned to its previous state…
So, obviously, mr Costello, it actually was quite funny, hilarious even!
Apparently, they were a glorious few years (for some), those late sixties.
But no time for singing! It was time to move onwards, maybe not geographically, but progress had to be made somehow! So, onwards and upwards, through silicon and space, with technology showing us the way, this western plain remaining the place of forever forward faced thinking, moving further away from our origin, moving towards whatever is just behind that stupid horizon we have to reach but just won’t come closer. Towards, as Wendell Berry might say, ‘the objective’:
This poem (please watch until the end), a timbered choir, ends with the lines:
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.
And, following these fantastical musings, it makes sense. If this need for progress is inside ‘the Westerner’, born and bred through millions of years, out of tens of millions of sunsets (but no sunrises), how to ease this ruffled spirit?
Carl Jung writes, in his essay ‘the modern spiritual problem’ (from: Modern man in search of a soul):
I have a Red Indian friend who is the governor of a pueblo. When we were once speaking confidentially about the white man, he said to me: “We don’t understand the whites; they are always wanting something - always restless - always looking for something. What is it? We don’t know. We can’t understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy.”
My friend had recognized…the Aryan bird of prey with his insatiable lust to lord it in every land - even those that concern him not at all. He also noted that megalomania of ours which lead us to suppose, among other things, that Christianity is the only truth, and the white Christ the only Redeemer.
Always wanting something, always restless, always looking for something. What is it indeed?
Could it be that we, all those thousand of years ago, severed ourselves in two? Yin losing Yang, a sunset split from its rise? If true, our current time, a time of chaos and destruction (mildly put), might partly be because of this separation. A separation from our origins.
But then, also, a beautiful possible present and future appears: one of integration. Understanding that one cannot be without the other, that the way forward could very well be beautiful, fulfilling, and filled with the greatest of promises, if, only if, grounded in origin. That through connection with our origin, progress is something that sustains us, that builds a more beautiful world, from the deep understanding of our connectedness with everything else, as our origin shows (adam coming from adama, man coming from soil and all that - see my first letter).
Sunrise cannot be without sunset, sunset is lost without a sunrise.
But then, of course, there is no such thing as a sunrise, or a sunset. It is us that revolves around the sun. It is us that was moving in circles all along. So sunset is sunrise, one and the same.
It seems I’m headed into Utopian territory. Eden, one might say.
A place that integrates our origins with our future. A place that helps us understand this truth, and helps us glue ourselves back together. A place that can be anywhere where people decide it is right, for neither East nor West is the answer.
Interestingly enough, I have just returned from a place that tries just that. An Eastern place on a Western island.
A place that just does good, that wants to help, with no alterior motives. A place pure and completely void of the transactional nature of our culture. The pervasiveness of this transactional culture seeps into our being, and creates a transactional mode of being. But this goes against someting that is inside all of us: kindness. Just pure and simple kindness.
It’s inside, right there, quietly beyond all things, and it isn’t something to learn, or to be willed into existence (we all know those smiles not reaching the eyes have no true effect, right?). Kindness is something to open up to.
In helping someone, from kindness, you feel, you know (because you experience it directly) that giving actually is receiving. It’s immediate. There is nothing ‘extra’ needed. There is nothing ‘outside of us’ needed for true exchange to take place. Again, we know that, the moment we truly give, without expecting anything back, we immediately receive. That is helping, that is true kindness, and that, so I have found, is to be found, within. How to get there?
Why not try some silence?
Love,
from,
Louis
More?
More.
Some more wondering wondering, sprinklings, thoughts, threads and endeavors I didn’t get to:
-
When I visited my first mediation retreat some five years ago, this song, before and especially after the retreat, was just the most soothing thing. It still is.
-
I just started in the book ‘The Man in the High Castle’ by Philip K. Dick. Who would’ve thought, I’m already enjoying it! I am very curious to know, who IS this man in this high castle? Also quite interesting: in the first few pages, the I Ching plays a prominent role, more precisely hexagram 15, also known as ‘modesty’ - the theme of my first newsletter.
-
More piano. Trying to learn this piece for months now. I don’t seem to be able to learn a new piece if I don’t take lessons, unfortunately…
I now see that there is also an alternative version:
-
Thinking about kindness this past week, I read this entry in the Red Hand Files, and thought it was a pretty nice summary of the film Amelie.
-
If interested in modern day Utopia, please read this novel by Aldous Huxley. Have I mentioned this before? I might have.
-
This is me on Instagram and Twitter.
-
This playlist is called ‘Sunday afternoon chill album shuffle.’ It might also work on a Saturday.
-
I give a course on living and working with the seasons and how to find a natural rhythm in life, with my brother in spirit Simon Ohler. If you want to join, that is entirely possible, by clicking here for example.
-
Also, with this same brother in spirit Simon person, a podcast has emerged called Spiritual Mischief. You might like it. The episodes eat up just a bit less of your time than this letter.
-
Also, here are some (Dutch) programs I have developed with Matthijs Schouten.
-
I think I actually have nothing to add now.
this is a psychedelic read, one I didn't know I need. I just had some tiramisu. a good day to you too.