Let us begin with Wisdom as a measure of Connection to Place. Let us further begin with Place as grounded in Mind.
Some fragments…
The Moment is the only “real” measurement of time.
All of perception arises as utility and tells us fundamentally nothing about some imagined (and perhaps even potential) objective Truth or underlying Reality.
I would like to describe three things here, aesthetics or beauty as the ground of action, the truth of the moment, and the mind as container and substance of all things.
The fundamental caveat for me as penmanship of the piece is that these statements will reflect only the perception of this human form and from what experience I might claim as my own. Wholly subjective, yet spoken from whatever place that may be that passes for “ground,” or objectivity.
So, where are we…?
Some things seem plainly self-evident. Space, time, the materiality of existence itself, the separateness of objects, each of these appear obvious.
How could my nose be distant from my fingertip were it not for space? How could I be younger than my parents if not for time? How indeed could I come to ask these questions, to have these experience, were it not that I am born of flesh and blood in a universe filled with the substance of elemental particles?
It helps to consider the nature of “obvious” as a utilitarian function of perception. If a certain frame, a constructed artifact of perception, serves to preserve and facilitate the lifecycle of an organism, such as recognition of danger, familiarity with context, etc., then that construct can shift in the categories of the mental model from novel to obvious and require fewer calories to process and engage.
Where to begin…
Wisdom as connection to place? I do wish that this piece of writing may reflect, may offer some nutritive wisdom to the observer. At the same time, I am finding a complex of ideas, perceptions, constructs, images, thoughts, and imagination swirling in my mind, like colored magic threads searching themselves and together for the path to become a tapestry.
The place, is this in mind? What place are these threads? What place is this dance? Where, indeed, to begin?
I suppose I have already been given a pathway (above):
First, beauty as the ground of action…
From there, the “truth” of the moment,
And then, perhaps full circle, mind as the container and substance of all things
What is missing? I wonder…
Where is wisdom in this context? I remember the work of our friend, Otto Scharmer, who points so usefully and so provocatively to the three divides at work in the deconstruction of the world today. The division of self from nature; the division of self from other; and the division of self from self.
If there is wisdom in this article of words, let it be in the longing that these divisions might compost into new orders of interconnected wholeness, integrity, and wellbeing for this little biosphere we call home.
In that last sentence, for me, there is beauty. May that prayer be the ground of action from which these words spring.
The Platonic ideals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, sometimes referred to as Art, Morals, and Science, are often considered (and usefully so) as three equal supports, fundamentally independent and sovereign in their dimensions from one another. I do not wish to break this utility, but I do want to invite a parallel insight on the matter.
Doubleness and Ontological Dynamism…
Not mentioned above, but brought to my attention by the philosopher Ken Wilber, that triad is also usefully represented in terms of “person perspective,” or pronouns such as “I” (first-person, subjective), “We” (second-person, intersubjective), and “It” (third person, objective.)
This is relevant to the deconstruction as I can never observe the perceptions of an other either externally, through the conventional five Western senses, nor internally, should we admit that construct of “mind reading,” without the mediation in all cases, of my first-person perspective.
In other words, and quite obviously, in all cases I am at the center of the experience. (Some may argue that this is not the case in transcendental experiences where the “I” appears to vanish entirely; however in these cases, the first-person is simply replaced with only-person or all-person perspective which, though semantically distinct is operationally the same as I think we will come to see.)
Given this frame, there are three domains of action. Action within the self: self real-ization, those movements that arise entirely within the sphere of “inner” awareness. The second domain, action within relationship, arises when two such inner-awareness begin to dance and inter-affect one another. (Notably, this phenomenon never arises independent of the observational quality within an individual self.) Similarly, a third domain of action may be considered as the relative stasis of objects with no “sovereign interior,” or sense of subjective identity.
In other words, Action As; Action With; and Action Upon.
…This is all beginning to feel quite intellectual and “deep rabbit hole” to me, but I have a faith that following through, we shall find a simpler home of love and care and compassion on the surface and in the sunlight. Let us continue…
As the point or “no-point” of perception is always fundamental to the arising of any of these action conditions or phenomenological territories, the “I/Art/Beauty/1st or only-person perspective/Subjective as the Objective” becomes the fundamental ground of not only perception, but the construction of meaning, values, and action beyond…
“Walk a beauty way.” This is a phrase I remember hearing somewhere in my youth, associated with Native American traditions. Today I can refer to the Diné concept of Hózhǫ́ǫ́gi — “walking in beauty.”
There is a deep humility stirred in my heart when reflecting on these words. Certainly, in my own lifetime, I have always and only undertaken those choices, those actions, that seemed to me in the moment to be the most beautiful. Perhaps, in some times of perceived poverty, that may have been replaced by choosing the “less ugly,” but even so amounts to essentially the same.
When I observe the choices, values, and actions of those around me, I cannot recall a single instance where I could perceive another choosing against their own sense of beauty, or in tragic conditions, the less ugly.
When I engage in community with others, we may synergize or we may negotiate, but when we act together, or in reverence or service to one another, in other words, when we choose and act morally or in the light of the good, it is simply an intersection, a state of agreement between our two views of beauty. (Beauty + Beauty = Good)
Similarly, from a vast, mysterious, and infinite set of kosmic possibility, I or we may choose to draw a boundary around a particular perspective or perspective set and call it a thing, call it objective, call it truth. But again this arises through a process of choice and acts of selection fundamentally grounded in the individual aesthetic willingness and living practice of walking in beauty. (Beauty + Good = True*)
This is not to say that there are no problems in the world, that all is beauty, and there is no place for resistance, objection, or change. Yet we may find ourselves back to this by another path. (Doubleness…)
What I am offering here is the perception, as a useful first principle, that not only art, but philosophy, morality, science, indeed the entirety of our human endeavor and aspiration as individuals and as a species, all come from the seed of our each, from yours, from mine, indigenous sense of real sublime, perhaps even divine, beauty.
In all things, begin with your own heart. In all things, begin with that which illuminates most brightly the flame of your own aesthetic, aligns most directly with your own compass of ecstatic love.
Your life, and indeed the world we built together of art, morals, and science reflects and will reflect the purity of aesthetic intent which we bring to that fundamental enterprise.
Doubleness and Ontological Dynamism… (He whispers again…)
The truth of the moment, or, When do we actually begin?
[Forgive me, I believe I may be out of order. Before Time, let us proceed to Mind…]
Above I wrote, “mind as the container and substance of all things.” What did I mean by this?
Over the years, the terms “mind,” “consciousness,” and “awareness,” have danced and woven and intermingled in my view. A deep inquiry into how these frames differ, inter-penetrate, or relate to one another is a subject for another time.
For now, let me simply make the distinction of Awareness as the fundamental emergence of perception from an otherwise undifferentiated, timeless, and boundless field of conditionless condition (if you will kindly forgive the mouthful.)
Mind arises subsequently within Awareness as the forms, qualitative nature, moment, and objects of that perception. With these definitions in hand, let us proceed…
The term “mind,” is it singular, or plural? Is it personal, or transpersonal? Is it my mind, or yours? Do we share a mind? If so, who influences it?
In point of fact, all of these questions, the perception of those words, the imagined understanding of meaning, the self perceiving, the ideas of an act of offering or receiving, all of these arise within mind. I as the actor, purveying these constructs, arise in mind. The idea of my substance, or yours, or any substance of meaning, inference, feeling, or construct, arises in mind.
I’m going to stop writing for a moment, rest in stillness, observe within awareness, and next give a few words to those observations that I might report on awareness or mind in this moment…
… There is movement and activity. Forms of thoughts, images, feelings, arise and pass away. There is a boundless quality, a field of simultaneously none and incomprehensible dimensionality. There is nothing of substance that persists but dynamism, space, and form flickering like light; awareness itself, as if awakened and come to life.…
Mind as the container and substance of all things. Truly you, or me, the cars I see outside my window, the buildings and trees beside them, the cloudy sky overhead, birds darting about, the window itself, my eyes, my mind, myself, all of these are artifacts of that dynamic luminosity of awareness, not existing independently themselves, but constructed entirely of that mystical substance of mind.
My friend, Dr. Daniel P Brown, said it plainly and simply enough,
“if there is some objective reality, some thing beyond this mind, the human instrument is not such that we could know it.”
Within mind we can know beauty.
Near the beginning of this article I made reference to a distinction between observations of reality and the utility of observations. This is relevant and important to our fundamental understandings of ontology as its distinction can lend utility to some otherwise intractable “realities.”
Wisdom is closeness to heart. It is closeness to love. It is connection to place which is the ground of beauty expanded into and throughout all things that arise in perception. Wisdom is presence to that fullness in the moment that is now.
The interface theory of perception, grounded in biological, physical, and social sciences, points out and corroborates, that those objects or artifacts of mind which arise as our perception of reality do not necessarily reveal anything at all of some underlying objective truth, but rather provide a structure and interface that serves a persistent evolutionary utility within the emergent construct (in this case, the living organism.)
For ages of evolution as form, from single celled organisms, through time and plant life, aquatic, reptilian, avian, mammalian, human, et al., these objects of mind have engaged in variously useful constructs of perception that provide a persistence of inquiry embodied within each form to live and evolve through time; some avenues proving more fruitful than others, but all as vital expressions of an underlying evolutionary impulse to existentially humble, yet bountifully creative experimentation.
These constructs of perception, in the human mind often philosophically confused as having anything to do with some divinely pure object reality, provide the utility of life itself. We do ourselves a disservice when we conflate these utilities with some imagined ground of meaning.
This does not, however, preclude the inquiry.
"For hundreds and thousands of years I lived as a mineral. Then I died and was reborn a plant.
For hundreds and thousands of years I lived as a plant. Then I died and was reborn an animal.
For hundreds and thousands of years I lived as an animal. Then I was reborn as a human.
What did I ever lose in dying?"
~Rumi
The window, the car, the sky, the trees, myself, this software, these words, all useful distinctions in persisting the inquiry that is Kabir. If, however, I might think it a beautiful aspiration to peer beyond these veils, this too I might do…
I return for a moment now to meditation that I might provide a more prescient narrative…
… Forms of light and movement and space arise, but they have no substance in their own. All are made of bare awareness. Awareness and observation of awareness arise as one pure substance, unbroken by any movement or dimension or contrast of any kind. Stillness, sublime….
In that, existence itself has no meaning, and yet from it I and we and this and all things spring forth as beauty and life and form…
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.”
~Rumi
In that, I have a place of dignity and beauty and love. In that heart, lives all things. In that heart lives the eternal aspiration towards the divine, towards truth, towards oneness. This is the ground of our lives, our relations, our work, our societies, our world.
Let us return now to the question of When do we actually begin to walk this beauty way?
Simply, now.
Like all constructed forms, time itself is a utility, and not always at that. Time arises, like existence itself, from bare awareness, and as it does so, it does so in a singular dimension; this moment, now.
Look now, yourself. You know these ideas of past and future, but can you find? Observe, what time can you touch? In what time do you exist in any experiential sense at all? Certainly we can think an image of our self set in some context of past or future, but does that apparition contain any semblance of your felt wholeness of self?
To give rise to Kabir, I must have that window. Without the creation of a moment of space-time, mind has no place to exist. Mind and moment arise together. No past, no future, these are imaginary and, ironically in the doubleness, arise later. Only now “really exists.”
Why is this important? Because it is now that we walk in beauty way, or not at all.
*To recap, we have two realities.
The first is the fundamental, the aspirational, the unknowable, the path to divinity, to Buddhahood, to profound grace; a place reached only through accident or discipline to shed all other perceptions.
The second reality is the practical, the substance and form that we can wrestle from the vast and eternal mystery, capturing it into discrete parts for the utility of values, survival, and intent.
The first reality is personal, it is the place from which we source our sense of direction, of beauty, of intuition.
The second reality we create together, through shared values, identity, humility, collaboration, and service.
The first reality is truth. It is nonnegotiable, it is your essential self, filled with inherent dignity, sovereignty, divinity and majesty.
The second reality must be sought, tested, and revised, constantly revised.
The first reality is perfected, unflinching, not bound by our ideas, identities, or constructs.
The second reality is made from the substance of mind, it is dynamic, imperfect, useful, fickle and subject to change. (I hope this last point is self-evident as we look back over the march of science, religion, technology, and the implications of knowledge over time.)
The first reality is singular, unbroken, eternal, arising in and from the reference point of awareness itself.
The second reality is plural, dynamic, fragmented, alluring and often uncooperative, a many faceted jewel casting a unique spectrum of beauty for each observer.
These two realities are the place of wisdom. Wisdom is connection to place. The depth and breadth to which we apply our awareness in this place is the degree to which we are wise.
These times in the world today long for wisdom. May we find it together.