Dogen and Peirce, phaneroscopy and zazen

All things have no signs:
This is the real body of Buddha.

Avatamsaka Sutra (Cleary 1984, 380)

All thought is in signs.

Peirce (EP1:24)

From Dogen's Fukanzazengi (‘Instructions for Zazen’):

Put aside all involvements and suspend all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do not judge true or false. Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.

Could it be that the real body of Buddha is what Dogen called One Bright Pearl?
and what Peirce called the phaneron? He used this word ‘to denote the total content of any one consciousness (for any one is substantially any other), the sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value’ (EP2:362).

Can this question be investigated?

The investigator would have to practice both phaneroscopy and zazen,
and be fluent in both Peircean and Buddhist dialects.

Is it possible to investigate such a question while practicing
zazen or phaneroscopy?

This question is left as an exercise for the reader (along with the links provided here).

Passing in a river

The deep source of the stream (hear it now?)
is implicit in what everybody knows.
That's why no formula
can fully explicate or comprehend it.
The process of recognizing
is not the kind that can be completed.
That's why nobody knows very much.

… we are all putting our shoulders to the wheel for an end that none of us can catch more than a glimpse at—that which the generations are working out. But we can see that the development of embodied ideas is what it will consist in.

— Peirce, CP 5.402 n2 (1893)

And we can sense the turning of the wheel
as its myriad expressions,
in the weight of light,
the turbulence of time,
the living edge of possibility passing,
selected by choice or circumstance
for falling into permanent place as the past
or vanishing into the might-have-been.

On purpose

You can never be sure that your intentions will be realized in practice.
You can always be sure that your actions will have unintended consequences.
From those you may yet learn something;
if there's nothing to learn, it's the end of learning.
And the end of intention?
To realize it
is to let it go.

Waking to time

When you wake up in the morning, some range of possibilities lies ahead (whether you are aware of them or not). The day will determine which of these are realized. At the end of the day, those living possibilities have either been fixed as definite facts or vanished into the unrealized. Time is the transformation of possible futures into the actual past, where possibilities no longer live.

Does the prospect of your death matter more than the presence of time?

Entertainment

Buddhists speak of ‘eight difficult births’ – if you are born in these places, ‘it is difficult to come to practice of the Way’. One is the realm of hungry ghosts, who (rather like giant acquisitive corporations) are defined by their insatiability. Another is ‘in Utturakuru, the continent north of Mt. Sumeru in Buddhist cosmology where everyone is always being entertained’ (Leighton and Okumura 1996, 57).

Entertainment is whatever passes the time instead of living the time.

Rehabilitating Information

That's the title of a paper i've just had published by the open access journal Entropy. Yesterday i updated my gnoxic home page to reflect some of the recent work that i've been doing instead of posting here.

While working on all this, it's occurred to me that humanity suffers from a global attention deficit disorder.

The cure won't be found at the end of any path or any rainbow; it's not something lost or hidden somewhere else; it's a matter of raising the quality, breadth and depth of our attention right here and now. What is the path right in front of us?

As Dogen said: a dream within a dream.

(You can be sure that whatever you write about it will be misread.)

Why sleep?

The last time i checked, scientists were still debating the question of why we sleep – what's the adaptive value, benefit, need or purpose of it?

I think all this debate is pointless, because the point of sleeping couldn't be more obvious: We sleep so that we can wake up.

But if we did reach a consensus on this, somebody would be sure to ask: What's the point of waking? Perhaps it takes an insomniac to ask that question … but again, the answer is obvious.

We need long periods of active wakefulness in order to sleep more soundly.

On timing

A couple of poems from William Blake's notebooks:

If you trap the moment before its ripe
The tears of repentance you'll certainly wipe
But if once you let the ripe moment go
You can never wipe off the tears of woe

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise

Divine manifestation

There is no God who is not wholly manifested here and now. There is no God finally manifest at any time: for manifestation is time.