We Always Live in a World of Meanings

Dear Friends,

We always live in a world of meanings.  "There's nothing, either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," says Hamlet.  Actually, there is nothing whatsoever for us unless we notice it, cognize it, make our preliminary guess about it.  This is as true of a pencil as of an archangel: we perceive only what we can perceive, and it means only what we allow it to mean.  It's not that there "is nothing really there;" it's just that what is there for us depends on our perception.

Our normal method to ascertain the validity of a perception is to check it out with other perceivers.  This is a fundamental principle of natural science as generally practiced, and it has its virtue: "Do you see what I see?"  Yet what the procedure gains in confirmability it loses in depth, since it confines our knowledge to what can be known by others who share a certain current, Industrial Age style of looking.  It may result in a horizontal accumulation of information and manipulation of the sensory world; it cannot lead to a vertical heightening of how we know, a deepening of how we love.

Our investigation into the Tao Te Ching -- and something of the same Way in Rilke -- has aimed at changing our cognitive stance from one of certainty and effort to one of openness and allowing.  In our meditation today, we'll practice the application of this stance to simple sense-perception.  Please have an unattractive, or at least not sentimental or obviously beautiful, stone on hand. 

And please come with a remembered anger to work with (in the privacy of your own mind; it's not group therapy).  We'll practice a changed stance toward our own emotions, and this tends to liberate our energies for a better experience of the significance, the sacredness, of what we see.

As the Tao Te Ching's Chapter 10 puts it, again in Ursula Le Guin's version,

Piercing bright through the cosmos,
can you know by not knowing?

 

wishing you joy in all you do,
Michael