The Natural and Supernatural Background

Dear Friends,

Our trouble with each other (war, Roe, economics), with the climate, and within ourselves, has to do with the kind of consciousness we bring to bear. Normal, Westernized, everyday consciousness is a complicated business; it isn't just one thing, any more than "nature" or "society" is one thing; it isn't all good or all bad. But I see that with my own normal, everyday consciousness, I can't understand the world or myself very well, and I don't behave at my best either.  

That is why we study and practice in and out of spiritual traditions. There is an obvious moral as well as epistemological side to the training of consciousness.  Concentration is selflessness.  Untrained normal consciousness, for all its occasional beauties, is shot through with self-pointing fixed forms such as greed, anger, ambition, self-hatred, prejudice of all kinds. To intensify our powers of attention is precisely to transform the inner strength and aliveness of these juicy-but-problematic forms so that we become alert to more of the living world. Then we speak and act more out of love and inspiration, less out of the myriad forms of self-seeking.  

The Romantic poets and philosophers knew about these matters and often wrote of them with bracing clarity.  They may be more readable now than ever before as the world they loved, and saw threatened through the Industrial Revolution, succumbs to the disastrous development of that same industrialization and the mindset that gave rise to it.

So today we will dive into a particular feature of a particular poem -- and its very theme is particularity:
 

 —But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
                      The Pansy at my feet
                      Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

This is from Wordsworth's "Intimations" Ode, which I recommend all to read, for instance here. While the passage, like the whole poem, is largely about the loss of a perceptual power he/we once had, Wordsworth does evoke a key feature of enhanced perception. It is the singularity, the particularity, of the one thing: one field, one tree, one flower. That is the feature we'll focus on today in meditation, and each of us will start with a specific natural phenomenon that has been dear to us personally.

To focus on the one loved object ends up implicating that object's enormous background. Think what you would have to gather if you wanted to make a paper-clip, let alone an oak tree! So in meditation we will pull on some one particularity and find that it draws after it the deepest fish in the sea, every power and blessing, and the stars, and you and me too.

with love,
Michael