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Philosophy

Positive Philosophy

—3—

We are on a fine line. In one hand we hold the actually abstract; in the other balances the non-abstract.

Our location is apparently at the limit. Any movement will cause a vibration, and may throw us off balance. Standing still, however, is also a movement, a movement that holds against flow. Openings to either side tempt us into entering but we remain unmoving, asking ourselves instead what we should do now that we are here. Such a question reveals that we are still not in fact where we thought we might have been. We are, that is, still working to fill the empty spaces that draw us into themselves. The question reveals an emptiness that wants to be something other than what it is. In a way each step of the cycle is completely predictable, and has its own unique history. But the attempt to move back down the spiral to examine the source of this history only confuses us, for when we think we have retreated we have only compressed the spiral, eliminating the fine distinctions that mark each point as uniquely there. A compressed spiral in the end becomes a tube, where all points blend into each other. We move away from today to grasp yesterday and tomorrow as objects to be known. Only a we in fact can do this. Better to allow the coils that have proceeded us to continue to vibrate. We look and listen, putting our ears to the rail to hear a distant train. So we return to a place we would like to say we have been before.

By opening slightly and allowing such creatures as energy and desire into the space we are laboring to create we threaten the integrity of our project. These words stand in a very special relation to us today. Each acts as a signal that should cause immediate alarm. Both are used so familiarly, as things which of course we know, that we are tempted to simply move on to other matters. As if there were other matters that could be considered to stand alone and separate from the discourse constructed within the confines of these concepts. Because of how we use language and its body of words, it at times becomes difficult to separate ourselves from the web woven by these very words. And this difficulty reveals further problems. We pause, and recall that we were not looking for problems, yet problems are what we are facing. Facing problems is an indication of a mis-step. We are not where we think we are. If we allow ourselves the luxury of speaking of a beginning we are only in the preparatory stages – we are, that is, only beginning to begin. But we are already here; the beginning has not only already begun, it has passed us so distantly that we can no longer detect even an echo of it. As perhaps the only proper response we re-place ourselves into the middle again. Or we would like to do this. Whether we will succeed remains to be seen.

The introduction of these two words opens the lid of Pandora's box. The words fly here and there around the room, free at last of their confining tomb, smashing against walls and floor and ceiling, bouncing around our heads, diving into our ears and noses and mouths, finding new resting places in the empty spaces inside of which we believe we can find objects like truth and home. Of course the whole point of having the box and keeping its lid closed had been to keep just this event from happening in the first place. To place a closed container within the space we inhabit tempts us to investigate. We have to suspect that it was we ourselves who placed the box into the space originally since the box always seem to be just where we are, and never anywhere else. We move, and the box moves with us, until one day we look down with surprise and see it there. We always follow, as noted.

The words that fly around in such a haphazard fashion disguise themselves by taking on the superficial appearance of the words around them. These words, as source, are like a spring out of which flows a multitude of other words. But they as source occupy a special place that cannot be ignored if we wish to continue on this path. Too many questions now arise, as is to be expected on the opening of the box. If we shut it, they will still be buzzing around, so that is not a solution. We recall now the notion of opening as respiration. Perhaps we do not need to fear this opening then, but rather should use it as an opportunity. But not an opportunity to question, or to create further objects with which to impede ourselves. We will not, that is to say, work at what these things are. This was the error of the preceding chapter, an error we will try not to repeat. The source of error is mis-comprehension of the mechanism. Mis-comprehension results from an inability to correctly see what is there. It is to look for a forest fire and to mistake the smoke for a cloud. In order to investigate the machinery confronting us we need the proper tools. Great energy has been required to construct these machines, and great energy will be required to manipulate them. We must proceed very carefully. We can compare ourselves to welders working far under the sea: we carry our equipment with us, and must be certain that it does not fail. Rather than worry ceaselessly if we have enough tools at our disposal we will begin to work. The work itself will reveal any insufficiencies, which we can then observe and negotiate. What must be noted is that in fact we always have enough for the particular moment and place we situate ourselves in. The nature of illusion is to not recognize this and to then seek more, which simply serves to perpetuate the process. As an experiment we will then state 'we have enough now'. Having enough we satisfy ourselves what we can comfortably begin the work.

As a first step we look towards this mis-comprehension. What do we mean, after all, by comprehension? Or rather, why have we arrived here? Let us shift slightly. The danger of familiar ground is that we do not see what surrounds us, while of course on alien ground we look for what is familiar to us and fail to see what is familiar to the others (the strangers who inhabit that ground). We are looking at a precarious balance. We return: – we have enough now! Because we have enough we are involved in this work. We are not concerned with the reason for this work. But we are not complacent – what we strive for is a carefully focused manipulation of the limit before us.

Because we are moving the limit also moves. What we are striving for is the alignment of our motion with that of the limit before us. We strive, that is, to create a space of work which remains steady within the flow. But this state itself is within movement, like a leaf floating down a river, only a leaf able to perform certain functions not ordinarily associated with leaves. Perhaps we can say that it is we ourselves who float down the river while holding our arms in the form of a circle. Or perhaps it is better to leave behind analogy altogether for the moment. To observe that we have enough now is to stop the effort to assert ourselves against the flow. We are given what we need by mechanisms which for the moment go unrecognized. As long as we breathe we maintain ourselves within this sphere. If we stop pushing out we receive nothing, and then begin what can be a rather lengthy walk towards death.

So the box is open. We open along with it, and begin to look at what has been released. How to look is not the issue for the moment. The coil gives an appearance of compression, and compression does not seem so far removed from comprehension. But to comprehend is to take a hold of, while to compress is to press together. We must take a hold in order to squeeze together. But what I really want is to simply feel the vibration of the coil: — it is already vibrating; I do not want to change it, and thus do not wish to comprehend or compress. The coil is motion, and the only real meaning we can assign to this motion arises out of ourselves, for we are the same motion. If we compress it, we compress ourselves, and that is not the right movement for this moment. This moment, then, concerns itself with expansion. We release the spring and so allow the vibration that is there to vibrate, and thus ourselves vibrate. The space which attempted to make itself an issue becomes increasingly irrelevant under the sustained cyclical movement. To move up and down a coil is vibration, in a manner of speaking.

We are now able to distinguish certain features, and can open slightly. We re-collect that we have enough now. This is a crucial step, for the sensation that we need something from the past is an admission of our emptiness in the present. But the process of feeding off the past is nothing more than the attempt to satiate the emptiness with something other than our own equipment. The satisfaction will always be both illusory and temporary. The latter especially because we have allowed ourselves to devolve into the temporal and then seek remedy by a furthering of the temporal, which in turn creates a thing, history, which grows ever larger and out of control, until we finally find ourselves completely lost. This is the problem with looking to the past. We cannot recreate it, whereas we can create currently. And I mean currently as within the current that composes us and our world. The effort required to live in the past will always be greater than that required to maintain ourselves in the midst of the current. To comprehend, compress, or even observe is never as efficacious as not doing so. It is within this context that the notion of action through non-action begins to come into something of a focus.

There is a certain pulsation to the mechanism: the empty space's borders do not have clear definition. Within the haze of this border there is a space asking to be filled. We are not justified in stating without hesitation that it is precisely this absent space which constitutes the lack the desire mechanism flows out of, and further, we are not even justified in stating how any of these processes work, or even that there are any processes at all. In fact, there is really no justification for the procedure we are engaged in. I would go so far as to say that it is precisely this lack of justification that enables us to have any hope whatsoever of proceeding. To fall back on a reason why is to allow ourselves to become re-snared. The web as such must vibrate, and we along with it. Searching for reasons simply adds an additional element to the movement; thus burdened, its motion grows heavy and unclear.

We have arrived at the edge of a crumbling cliff, and climb with relief through an available opening. Rather than continue to involve ourselves with words we must use the escape mechanism provided for us. We cannot penetrate infinitely while the world moves past us. As penetrating, in fact, we grow like a rock in the streambed, then get worn away. We would like ourselves to be real perhaps more than anything. But this unfulfillable dream revolves around something which steadfastly resists penetration. The agent that would penetrate by its very penetration destroys that which was sought after. This clearly is not a fruitful way. What is required is a return to our roots. But such a return invites us to return to what we hold as our roots, which we hold and create as that which is of history. History is the objectified within the temporal flow. History is the effort to transform the coiled vibration into a series of discrete points. X has meaning, Y does not; a judgment made possible only by the transformation of the process into X and Y in the first place. So history per se is not how we will locate our roots. When we look down to the base of a tree we are not looking down, but rather are searching for the foundation. The search for foundation is the most radical activity we can engage in, for without movement that is rooted we will invariably flounder and fall. If we pause to think we must begin to realize that our foundation is with us now, and, to be more precise, is never a temporal object which we can return to, and which we are removed from. To say we are removed from our root is so incoherent as to have virtually no meaning whatsoever. A tree removed from its root is a dead tree. So it is not that we are removed from anything – no, rather it is that we have become unclear as to what our root is. But this lack of clarity is not a lack of clarity towards some thing, a thing that somehow goes unrecognized in the onrushing torrent of events.

To say we have grown unclear is a fundamental proposition, and suggests that our nature as such has grown hazy. This haziness may in fact be an essential attribute of our nature; we may, in other words, always be in this condition. But such a continuum is of little interest – how, instead, do we begin to grasp the haziness which drives us to a historicized temporality in our search for a clarity which appears to elude us in our todays? Again the question reveals itself as a functioning of this lack: we have been forced to ask when what we need to do is move. Movement is not asking, but serves as a mechanism which drives away questions of clarity and obscurity. Movement is found within creation, and creation is a return to our root, for as we have already observed, what we are and do is the action of creation. This is what is most fundamental. But creation not as generally conceived as a magician making something out of nothing – a rabbit pulled out of a hat, for instance. Creation rather can be seen as the process by which a limit is formed then manipulated. The latter manipulation is actually what we call the creative process – there is a flow, call it music for example, which is redirected, but this very redirection is music, and forms the channel through which it flows. It is only because we recognize the radical nature of our own creation in music that music speaks to us so clearly. Music, in fact, might be called a teaching without words, for those inclined to hear it. And what is taught is what we are. But what we are is not a fixed thing, but is in fact this very process of directed flow.

We move ourselves within the process of creating ourselves, including the mechanisms by means of which we are able to reproduce the process. But this is a special kind of reproduction, since there is nothing that is re-produced in the sense of following some model or other, or some fixed plan spun out by divine beings. We are always producing, and the act of production moves us along the coil, but the coil does not exist outside of this process.

Movement clarifies, then. We will not rest on or in this point. Perhaps movement itself as a concept is what is holding us. 'We are moving' has after all no meaning. There must be layers which have been built up and which now impede further examination. We have raised a series of points, and they can now be connected. There is never a randomness or chance; such an idea arises from an insufficient grasp of the circumstances at hand. We are currently in our circumstances – the place we are in is that which is ours, and none others'. Who then do we call ourselves? We will allow this question not because I believe we can answer it, but because it should be asked if only to remind us that the result is not sure. What we take for granted as we ourselves is what is the premise we might want to investigate. But how do we approach such a premise? There is asking, but asking can only reinforce what is asked about. For example the more we enquire into the atom the greater is our fundamental faith in the primacy of that way of seeing into things. So to ask about ourselves is to increase our selves' strength. And what gets stronger must break. It is not clear if a breaking is what is sought here. A bending, flexibility, might serve us better on this occasion. So we are looking to bend ourselves, but not in the sense of the distortion caused by a trick mirror. Bending ourselves is the motion and action of taking what we are and using it as the foundation, or springboard, for change. But already there are problems: we are not able to move away from ourselves if we use these selves as the source of movement. We as constituted cannot move away from ourselves. And here is where the key point lies – why, after all, do we believe that this is necessary? The idea that we need to move away from something is wrong. It is the second source of religion. Perhaps where we need to move is exactly with ourselves. And this with is the motion which we are when we do not ask, or investigate. A with of this character does not ask what or how or why or when or even who. The follower of what how why when who is always the is. When is it?, what is it?, why is it?, how is it? – once the it is constituted we can move onto refinations, such as how do I do it? The asking structure thus is not something we will randomly be cautious about engaging – no, rather it is a fundamental part of the obstruction that keeps us away from the ability to move with ourselves. It is not a question of 'who we are' at all. What we are looking at here is a complete dissolution of questioning.

In this dissolution we will step away from certain difficulties, not because we want to avoid them but because to continue the pursuit leads only to increased difficulties. Desire as a concept simply does not in its vagueness serve us. To say we desire not to desire must mean exactly that. No matter how we look at it, we desire to know the answer to the question, and the question has arisen because something is absent and we would like to know what it is. But there is not anything missing. What we hold as missing is only that which we have attempted to hold as that which is obscured by haziness. But because we hold this obscuring as much as we hold anything, the idea that we cannot penetrate it is simply the idea that we cannot penetrate ourselves, and this idea is completely correct. The error has arisen with the movement to penetrate. Penetration is a deepening of the problematic. When we penetrate into what a thing is, we land in being, for instance. So while reason asks firmly for such action, we are not thereby required to carry it out.

In the nature of flow such a deepening occurs when an obstruction or depression is reached. In order to surmount it we must fill the space. Only once the space has been filled can we begin to resume our movement. This is the sense behind the saying 'that which does not destroy makes stronger'. Of course we are not looking so much to get 'stronger'. The strong breaks while the weak bends and lives. Flexibility is a fundamental aspect of motion. If we cannot give we cannot move. Because there can be no perspective that stands outside of the meaning, or sense, we give to our world, we cannot actually distinguish in any obvious fashion whether movement occurs. There are, however, signs. If movement has occurred the seeing will change – how, that is, things look and feel does not remain constant. A frequent indication of old age is the pining for how things 'used to be'. This pining reveals a stiffening, since how they 'used to be' can never be how they 'are'. And this is a rather obvious point: if everything flows, nothing remains the same. Allowing ourselves to move with the world allows us to conserve the energy we would otherwise have to expend maintaining its stability against change. It is the difference between standing in a mountain river and floating down it. Because, however, we have come to attach such great importance to the world created by us, and to this us itself, we sense, correctly, that we will lose ourselves if we lose our world. Even though this loss is a loss of nothing, we still resist loss, along with the anxiety that precedes the realization of its impending character.

If, however, we pause, and allow our thinking to proceed, what is really at issue is not maintaining ourselves with but then against the world, but rather creation. Freedom comes in the creative movement because the creative movement occurs at precisely the moment of emptiness which is held to be the cause of such fear and trembling. The jump is not a jump to an absolutely abstracted otherness, but is rather a return to the pre-judgmental position. To call this a return to the child-like is incorrect, however, since as returning we have already traveled, and move in the manner of a traveler. We are experienced, and in that experience exists the separation. We do not overcome experience but rather use it.

We have worked ourselves into a riddle. In order to more properly examine our surroundings we need to note that what we are calling desire should not be so called. By continuing in the use of this we retain our blindness. The haziness around us neither thickens nor thins. Without knowing we are at the center of the boundaries. What binds us is desire, it is in this manner of speaking the motion of binding. Which is to say that we bind ourselves. To create an object, to remove it, to yearn for it – these activities come out of us, and are in no way originary. The motion of desiring is the motion of seeking more than what you have. This is another way of saying that you are attempting to expand your boundaries. But while desire is not originary, it attaches itself to that which moves in a more central manner. Desire is the motion of unfulfilled fulfilling. This is to say that we want to move our boundaries, we want to flow – in fact, we do not want boundaries at all. It is only once we have constructed boundaries that we have an emptiness that seeks filling. Fulfilled living is the living that comes when you realize that you have enough. Thus this realization is not a minor, inconsequential thing, but is rather the end of this particular process. But, as ending, it occupies a certain privileged space, in that the end that is reached is not a place, but rather a condition, a condition of sufficiency. Within this sufficiency resides the true end, which is the end of the production of the desire producing bordering movement. Our energy is no longer diverted into the construction/absorption cycle of the object world. The worlding moves away from objectifying, which is not to say we abandon objects, but rather that we return to a more sustainable function in which the objects we have are sufficient.

The way we move at this juncture is to avoid pitfalls. The construction of an endless chain of objects floating on the verbal function of is is transformed into an unattached, non-directed floating. Although we find it difficult to believe, to expend less effort on the construction of our object world is of course much more efficient than the wholesale expenditures we surround ourselves with today. It is only because we use so much energy in the construction of our world that we can even think of ourselves as individuals in the first place. We are left to wonder what would happen if we did not use our energy in this way.

So we have moved. While our direction is unclear what is left behind still calls us for a return. The return is in this case actually a regression, so we opt for an actual return. Returning as understood by us has the primary sense of turning back, but also of sending or giving. How we use words is an interesting field. We take what fills our needs and in turn fill the word. So the use of language is not an arbitrary process. In returning we reciprocate, we send back, we give, and in this we turn away from what is not this. Desire is not return. Desire is limitless expansion, unfulfillable filling. Return stops the entire process of pushing against the limit. Such a stopping is not a fixing or rigidifying, but is instead a freeing. When we follow in the steps of the unfulfillable we become trapped, needing always more and more of what we are not. To need what we are not is as the words clearly indicate a pursuit of what we are not. To pursue what you are not is a poor use of your resources. This pursuit is initiated by an increased focus on the question of what things are. To stop asking this is to stop asking about things. Things return to their proper positions as servants. Simply by this stopping we begin to prepare ourselves for the return, the turning back towards, but also the repeating of the turn, once again turning. We turn again, we enter the circle. We stop our ceaseless movements outwards and return to a turning. Inside of the turning is empty space, while what turns is turned by us, and is what we held as the limit. When we stop this holding the limit becomes free to once again turn, and with this turning the emptiness which we strove to fill returns to an emptiness which is simply there. By concentrating our efforts now on the turning rather than on the fruitless filling our breath settles. Settling means the return to a rhythm not dominated by a constant outward push.

But return also means to reciprocate. Thus it comes with an obligation. We must return in kind. What we have been given we must in turn give. Thus we are not talking about some 'floating in the center removed from conditions' type of movement. We turn the limit, and within this turning we give what we have received. This is the root of exchange. Exchange today is so removed from this that it has become virtually unrecognizable. To return what you have been given means not simply giving back unchanged, however. For the return to have significance it must involve effort. Significance arises by the investiture of your self. You give yourself, you give what it is you have that is most central and valuable. What is most central and valuable is not a considered property, like money, but functions more in the manner of completion. Completion assumes incompletion, which itself comes out of the fact that we are not monads. To assume we are monads is to mistake the turning or outflowing pushing for a thing, an object. Completion is also a complementing which in turn fills. Thus the return when carried out fully fills the emptiness which desire had ceaselessly worked to fill. Returning moves us away from ourselves. This movement is a reconnection of the fragmentary. The teacher and his pupil do not exist as superior and inferior but as something larger than the two parts. The same applies to a husband and wife. We reverence the latter relationship even today simply because it is so central. But to call a relationship of any sort central is to move drastically away from the conception of self and object as central, as having existence. A relationship exists as such only with a reciprocal exchange, but what must be grasped is that it is the exchange that composes the relationship; it is not some thing between two things. If we insist on thinking of a relationship as a thing, it is a thing composed only of activity and effort.

Relating is to refer or bring back. Once again we return to what the words actually say. We return to the word, we return to the speaking that is the logos. The haziness has arisen because we have forgotten to look at the words we so casually use. Words have a function, and that function is the reason for the use of the word. So in relating we bring back. But we ask ourselves what is brought back – the answer, of course, is nothing. Referring is relating which is carrying back. We are examining an activity. We turn back to bringing back. But relating actually is completion, in that we have been brought back already. And what we have been brought back from is a pushing out which is the selfing; in trying to bring to completion, door after door opens down an endless hallway. To try to understand this means that we must move ourselves until we are standing in or under what we are looking at. This movement is itself return, and so once we bring ourselves back we are able to stand among in relatedness. Bringing-back is thus not different than standing-in. But what we consider to be the substance in which we stand is not different from us. We can say that we bathe in the flowing but the bathing is a dissolution. Error is dissolved and in this dissolution arises understanding. Understanding cannot arise without this movement. It is not that we change ourselves to become something else but rather that we release the holding-onto or grasping-out and in this release return. Understanding is a condition that can only arise in this abandonment. But it is not even so much that we are standing in or under, but that standing comes back to the unfixed, the non-temporal, and as such allows us room to breathe.

We recall that understanding is a concept, but one of a group of highly privileged concepts, in that members of this group can only be grasped by our selves becoming the concept. But to put it this way misleads slightly. X does not transform to y. It is at such times that we begin to see how our language contorts and mystifies. But this obscuring distortion is not necessary. Language can serve adequately as a tool so long as we allow it to breathe. When we speak of understanding we are speaking of walking back into. This walking does not stop at point x, y or z, but moves, and in moving achieves the condition. The condition likewise is no-thing, but is rather nothing other than walking back into.

At this juncture we have to stop. While it is good to examine the tools we are using we also need to not fall away from the task at hand. This falling away/return process is a balance which forms the path we walk upon. To move too greatly in one direction or the other will cause a loss of balance. To lose balance is to lose harmony. Harmony occurs when things fit together. Such a joining gives us a return, which is what we are looking at. But really what we want to do is not so much look as to enter into the process. We wish to join together, that is. Within this wish we locate certain problems, first of all the presence of the wish itself. So we alter slightly, and note that in order to reach completion we need to enter. Entering is understanding in so far as we move ourselves away from the object field out towards which we always seek to reach. Stopping this outward extension allows us to gradually increase our focus on understanding.

Understanding traditionally has been held as one of the central aims of philosophy. Understanding occurs when we are in a work. So we ourselves will enter into this work and see how things evolve, and in evolving unravel and reformulate. Understanding floats at the end of being; or rather, understanding floats when being ends. Our philosophy has for so long wrapped itself up in these cords that such an ending seems far beyond high time to call for. In fact, the end has already been reached; today only force of habit, as well as a world bursting with things we need to live, maintains this corpse past its proper burial time.

But I am not interested in celebrating any deaths just yet. I merely want to point out that while the situation is already untenable, it continues by force of inertia. That is the lay of the land, the field upon which our actions are carried out. To make a movement we need to know where we are. With that we will again stop, pause, look around, try to enter into the particulars as they rise and fall before us. This latter stopping, however, will function in a unique way, in that where we are will attempt to maintain a condition of fluidity. We will float down the river watching the trees go by. This of course is an ambitious task, which is not to say impossible. The field of possibility is precisely the field that opens on such floating, however. We occupy a fluid arena and carry our homes with us. The sense and meaning we require will grow in proportion to the work we expend on the construction of such a resilient residence – resilience required of course because without flexibility such a structure will smash apart on the first rock it encounters.

We return to a question of pasts. We resist returns in that we want to move towards a goal. This movement we consider progress. We want to evolve and advance – what should develop must do so, we tell ourselves. But this is all a lie. We move awkwardly in a box made of ends and beginnings. We are looking for resolution where none can be found. Within our western tradition our religions and systems of science rise and fall but never lose this foundation. The searching we engage in can never be resolved; no advance ever occurs, and in our endless pushing we move farther and farther away from the motive. The pushing-against results in the construction-of. The resulting edifice, while impressive, has no function. This comes as some surprise, since we hold our sea of constructions to have function as their primary attribute. A car takes us from place to place, a soft drink quenches our thirst. When we attach ourselves to a logic contained in the premise it can hardly be surprising that the outcome agrees. Questioning the logic might make the chain of command more clear, but the central idea maintains its control as firmly as ever, if not more so. Searching for the logic of an operation is merely to encase within a structure — the nature of limit grows in this environment with speed and enthusiasm.

When we look at return we need to ask ourselves about our motivation. But the asking we look for follows the path which has already been laid out. Entering that path results only in a return to the condition we began in, which is to say a return to pushing out against the limit created by ourselves. Our ceaseless striving traps us and creates the wish to be free. Freedom as a concept exists always as that unreachable other that could never exist were it not for our self-encasing maneuvers. As we cement ourselves we yearn for the fluid. The fluid however as condition does not yearn for anything and cannot be reached by effort of desire, for purposeful directed striving and desire always hold a goal outside of themselves as the motivating force towards which we are to propel ourselves. We can compare ourselves to a rabbit chasing a carrot hanging from a stick tied to its head. This is why it is said that the wise man desires not to desire. But this condition is so radically removed from our present that to even speak of it returns an odd, mutilated echo.

The speaking we are after, then, does not radiate off the walls of our enclosure, but rather is direct. Because we surround ourselves with glitter, we ignore the ordinary and plain. But it is precisely to this unquestioned ordinariness that we must return if we are to be able to continue our investigation. What is ordinary is what is so fundamental that it goes unquestioned; or rather, it never even is approached by question. In this way we find the source of the flowing motion.