Hologram, Ecogram, Mandala, Part V---Language and Time

What is our relationship to time? What is time? How do time and language relate? How do our concepts of time and the concepts encoded into our language constrain us? 

If you need to take a nap now, will you? Do you have time?  

If you need to have a breakdown now, will you?  

If you need to call your mother now, if you need to call a friend, if you need to walk in the forest, if you need to sit in silence or rest in the sun, will you?  

Are we cut off from our own heart-mind-body-world-cosmos? Does the clock cut into the soul?  

Does the divine wear a wristwatch? Does Sophia (Wisdom) care about daylight savings time? Does Sophia care about school calendars and shareholder meetings? Does Sophia care how much the U.S. will spend on its next presidential election, or how long it will run?  

And . . . How easy would it be to suddenly sense the manipulations, to suddenly sense the false transparency of the clockwork world we have constructed? To sense the confection? To sense our addiction to its seeming sweetness? 

Recall again the Dalai Lama’s comments in his book, The Universe in a Single Atom (we considered them in the second installment in this series). Here it is again: 

After having talked to numerous scientist friends over the years, I have the conviction that the great discoveries in physics going back as far as Copernicus give rise to the insight that reality is not as it appears to us. When one puts the world under a serious lens of investigation—be it the scientific method and experiment or the Buddhist logic of emptiness or the contemplative method of meditative analysis—one finds things are more subtle than, and in some cases even contradict, the assumptions of our ordinary common-sense view of the world. 

One may ask, apart from misrepresenting reality, what is wrong with believing in the independent, intrinsic existence of things? For Nagarjuna [a revered Buddhist philosopher], this belief has serious negative consequences. Nagarjuna argues that it is the belief in intrinsic existence that sustains the basis for a self-perpetuating dysfunction in our engagement with the world and with our fellow human beings. By according intrinsic properties of attractiveness, we react to certain objects and events with deluded attachment, while towards others, to which we accord intrinsic properties of unattractiveness, we react with deluded aversion. 

In other words, Nagarjuna argues that grasping at the independent existence of things leads to affliction, which in turn gives rise to a chain of destructive actions, reactions and suffering. In the final analysis, for Nagarjuna, the theory of emptiness [a core theory of Buddhist philosophy, perhaps the core theory, which the spiritual exercises of Buddhist traditions invite us to verify by means of experiment or experience] is not a question of the mere conceptual understanding of reality. It has profound psychological and ethical implications. 

I once asked my physicist friend David Bohm this question: from the perspective of modern science, apart from the question of misrepresentation, what is wrong with the belief in the independent existence of things? His response was telling. He said that if we examine the various ideologies that tend to divide humanity, such as racism, extreme nationalism and the Marxist class struggle, one of the key factors of their origin is the tendency to perceive things as inherently divided and disconnected. From this misconception springs the belief that each of these divisions is essentially independent and self-existent. Bohm’s response, grounded in his work in quantum physics, echoes the ethical concern about harbouring such beliefs that had worried Nagarjuna, who wrote nearly 2000 years before. 

Granted, strictly speaking, science does not deal with questions of ethics and value judgements, but the fact remains that science, being a human endeavour, is still connected to the basic question of the well-being of humanity. So in a sense, there is nothing surprising about Bohm’s response. I wish there were more scientists with his understanding of the interconnectedness of science, its conceptual frameworks and humanity. (2004: 50-1)

Grasping at an independent existence . . . this means grasping in direct contradiction to the Nature of mind, which is inherently relational, interwoven. To grasp in contradiction to our own Nature . . . does that not seem the essence of ignorance? And don’t we grasp in time? Don’t we even grasp after time, grasp at time? 

This independent existence of things goes altogether with time and with our delusions.  

Of all the forms of delusion and self-deception, the subject-object duality seems most difficult to dispel. Nietzsche wondered if the truth could ever be incorporated—Can we really grok the truth of reality and live in attunement with it? Or will we keep trying to satisfy ourselves with attunement to our agendas?  

We might deduce some aspects of reality, as Nietzsche did, and as contemporary science does too—and on this the scientists and many saints and sages agree: Inquiring with care, we find no isolated, fixed entities, but rather flux, impermanence, surprise (really, wonder), discontinuity, nonlocality, interwovenness—taken together, we could refer to it as wisdom, love, and beauty, or simply as sacredness.  

Plenty of scientists might think we must ultimately see our individuation as highly relative and, from some perspective, delusory. Not only Einstein in his famous letter, but many other scientists might see things this way. Einstein’s thoughts have become fairly well-known, but worth reviewing here: 

February 12, 1950

Dear Mr. Marcus:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.

With my best wishes,
sincerely yours,

Albert Einstein.[1] 

Mr. Marcus’s son had died, and he sought counsel from the great scientist. Perhaps ordinary philosophers and spiritual figures had failed him. In any case, we can sense here a living LoveWisdom at work in Einstein’s compassionate response: Seeing through or cutting through our supposed limitedness often gets framed as a Great Liberation, a Great Peace.  

At the same time, we need to admit that we fear the profound unknown of such an insight, since it would seem to dissolve us into nothingness—perhaps by dissolving us into everything. We thus experience self-doubt about what we are, and we may even feel comfort in the defacto taboo against knowing who we are, what we are.  

What are we outside of time, outside of schedules, aims, agendas, career goals, political parties, and all the rest? We cling to our self and all the coordinates that define it, and we fear any loosening of our grip, fear any exit from the Cartesian coordinate system and the clocks that keep the “I think” running about. The ego will only be pried from our cold, dead hands, one might guess.  

And yet spiritual practice can occasion the “Great Death” that marks the soul’s Birth, the insight by which we let go of this optical delusion of consciousness. We must stress again and again the seeming impossibility or inconceivability of this kind of insight, which happens not by means of any drug or blunt force. We have to see the total relationality of ourselves, and this terrifies us since we think it will turn us into nothingness, and maybe make us let go of our cravings, clingings, comforts, habits, possessions, and so on.  

Who wants liberation if it means giving up pumpkin spice lattes or Chicken McNuggets—or maybe giving up reading so much academic philosophy? Who wants an unknown Joy when we have the known suffering, and a whole host of things we convince ourselves we can control? 

Ironically, if we can confront this terror and get through it, life becomes more beautiful, more wondrous than all our cravings, more meaningful and fulfilling than all our beliefs about what we need to be happy—at least this is what so many philosophical/spiritual traditions assure us, and though we may harbor some doubts, our only recourse in good conscience involves running the experiment with our own lives, and verifying the findings of so many diverse people, wise ones who lived across vast expanses of landscape, culture, and history.  

David Bohm, the great physicist mentioned above by the Dalai Lama, offered some wonderful suggestions about time and its relation to our incoherence, self-deception, and the many maladies of “civilized” life, all of which go together with a misunderstanding of time, and the employment of time as a mechanism of manipulation and control.  

In dialogues collected in the well-titled book, Thought as a System, Bohm says the following: 

the very notion of time itself is misunderstood. Even in physics it is not adequately being understood as an abstraction, as a representation. In a certain area this will not be too important, because physical processes are regular enough that they can be measured by time. Therefore, even though you have this misunderstanding you are not going to come to a serious practical incoherence. For instance, if we have all timed our watches together and we say that we are going to meet at a certain time, then, if our watches work properly, we will be in the same place. If they don’t work properly we will not. So you can see that, physically, the concept of time implies that there is a great order of nature in the whole universe. From the most distant stars to here, every atom vibrates at a certain rate which is the same as it is here. There are all sorts of regularity that constitute a vast system of order, which the concept of time is tapping into, as it were. If that order were not there time would not be of much use. If the rate of atoms were to become contingent and sort of jump around, then you might as well give up the notion of time. If there were nothing which would follow that order, there wouldn’t be any use to think of it. (232) 

Time and agenda mimic or tap into the deeper ordering (cosmos) of Nature—with significant negative side-effects, since we do not actually practice-and-realize that ordering of Nature, the ordering of the sacred, the sacredness of the cosmos. In ancient Greek, the word “cosmos” signified an order, an ordering, and also an adornment, in the sense that Sophia shows Her beauty outwardly, not only in what Bohm would call an implicate order, but in the explicate order too.  

Ordering already arises—a sacred creative ordering is the happening of all things, the totality of our experience and our nature. But narrow human thinking attempts to apply its own ordering, its own meanings and agendas on top of that Cosmos, on top of the sacred-creative-ordering-and-adorning (a complicated construction in words . . . it is not easy to be precise, especially in English).  

We behave as if we can snap our fingers and make the clock go back an hour (calling it “daylight savings time”), or build nuclear weapons (now “hypersonic” ones, small enough to become ever more tempting to actually use), or launch rockets into space (turning space into a capitalist catastrophe), or make a mountain of plastic coffee pods (for convenience).  

In the same way time and agendas mimic or tap into the deeper ordering of Nature, science and technology mimic or tap into certain dimensions of wisdom, love, and beauty—with tremendous negative consequences, since we fail to actually presence—fail to practice-and-realize—wisdom, love, and beauty, but instead practice and realize fragments and fragmentation. 

Bohm continues: 

 . . . every thought assumes time. Whether we discuss thought or anything else, we always take time for granted. And we take for granted the notion that everything exists in time. We don’t take for granted that time is an abstraction and a representation, but we take for granted that time is of the essence—reality—and that everything is existing in time, including thought. There’s some correctness to that, in the sense that its order of succession can be put in terms of time. (233) 

Time is the essence. We find that in our practice. We practice-and-realize “time is the essence,” and yet it means we practice and realize a delusion, a misunderstanding. We actively misknow our situation.  

We use time as an essence, and this unskillful relationship with the rhythms of life and with the Nature of moment goes altogether with the misuse of ourselves and our world. We use time as part of using our body, our mind, our heart, our soul, our landscapes, our world, our whole community of life. We use ourselves and our world unskillfully and unrealistically.  

We don’t ask if a crop is ripe and ready based on the rhythms of life, for we must get the crop to market. We might never delay a harvest to allow the crop to reach a peak of nutritional value if we would lose money in the process, and if we could get it to market looking decent enough—even if that means we must use chemicals to process it. So many crops cannot possibly reach optimal nutritional value, because we may ship them thousands of miles. We relate to agriculture irrespective of optimal nutrition and irrespective of whether our patterns, purposes, and agendas work for life—which includes us, but does not include our notions which go against life.  

One of the greatest absurdities, and also one of the clearest symptoms of our insanity, is Earth Overshoot Day. We pass “Earth Overshoot Day” either without notice, as part of attending to another day’s worth of appointments, or with a fleeting lament that we don’t know how to respond to, lament we cannot listen to and care for.  

Earth Overshoot Day is the day we have already reached the estimated annual carrying capacity of the planet. This is an even more insane notion than “daylight savings time,” and at the point we need to calculate such an event as “Earth Overshoot Day,” we should declare a crisis in our way of knowing and being, a crisis in our manner of living and loving. The existence of such a day should strike us down, should stop us in our tracks, and we should realize that we would best abandon all attempts to “manage” the carrying capacity of the Earth, for it has its own flow of meaning, its own sacred creative ordering, its own cycles and relative boundaries, the edges of which we should never verge near. We should stop, out of immense shame and humility, and begin to learn again how to listen.  

According to overshootday.org, in 2019 we surpassed the planet’s carrying capacity on 29 July of that year, and thus we lived, for five full months, at a deficit in a situation in which we cannot rationally think of ourselves as being able to have one. The global pandemic slowed ecological unskillfulness such that overshoot day happened on 22 August in 2020. It will likely move earlier in the year in 2021. No amount of overshoot seems rational. 

Indeed, it marks an extraordinary crisis in reason and compassion, an unprecedented tragedy of wisdom, love, and beauty that we continue carrying forward in such a pattern of insanity. As we have all grown weary of hearing, there is only one planet, not the 1.7 we currently live off of, or the 5 we might need if everyone lived as people in the U.S. live (where, of course, massive inequality also means a small group of people use an incredible amount of natural “resources”—simply owning a yacht or a private jet puts one into stratospheric levels of consumption, let alone all the rest of one’s lavish lifestyle).  

With the rarest possible exceptions, we can in general say there can be no wise, skillful, realistic deficit spending with respect to ecologies (and what a strange phenomenon that many of us have heard something like this often enough to grow tired of it . . . and yet it persists). 

This notion also applies to ourselves as ecologies. As a consulting philosopher, when people come to me asking about certain physical, psychological, or spiritual pains, and we work together to discover and create a way beyond the symptoms, they will often say in regard to the new way: “That’s too inefficient!” What irony. A person may, for instance, experience pain in their back or elbow because of how they do their job. Observing their relational-dynamism, observing their coordination or synchronization of heart-mind-body-world-cosmos, it may become plain that they essentially misuse themselves, that they suffer from unskillful synchronization, and this results in something like a repetitive stress injury or some other negative side-effect (on a larger scale, it also relates to the degradation of ecologies, the persistence of inequalities and injustice, and so on). Therefore, the way they express their total dynamism involves a lack of grace, dignity, or poise, a lack of realistic and skillful relationship (i.e. open relational activity of life), even a lack of skillful intention, and this ultimately comes altogether with injury, troubles, suffering in themselves and the world. 

One might call using oneself into injury an inefficient use. But “efficiency” in ordinary parlance relates to the ego’s agendas, and typically relates to time and impatience. In Nature, things take as much time as they take, so to speak. Wolves wear no watches, birds don’t consult egg timers. No sentient being other than the human tries to apply this sort of concept of time, with its “rational efficiencies”. 

Mention of “rational efficiencies” brings to mind the work of anthropologist Jeremy Narby. In his book, The Cosmic Serpent, Narby writes: 

In the early 1980s, international development agencies were pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the “development” of the Peruvian Amazon. This consisted of confiscating indigenous territories and turning them over to market-oriented individuals, who would then develop the “jungle” by replacing it with cow pastures. Experts justified these colonization and deforestation projects by saving that Indians didn't know how to use their lands rationally. I wanted to argue the contrary by doing an economic, cultural, and political analysis showing the rational nature of Ashaninca resource use.  

The problem he faced: He really did find their use of resources rational and efficient, but the way they learned that use came from a source the scientistic and economic mind would characterize as irrational and inefficient, for it included ceremonies, rites, rituals, and mystical experience, including the skillful use of ayahuasca, a holotropic medicine (a medicine that turns us toward wholeness, holiness, and healing). Narby thought it best to leave out the mystical source of Ashaninca ecological wisdom. 

Rational and economic thinking as we cultivate it in the dominant culture often displays a radical disconnect with the activity of Nature, Cosmos, and Psyche (Soul), which has its own logic and efficiency. The efficient way to make an apple is, apparently, a process on the order of billions of years, in terms of conventional notions of time. We humans want to make apples in the laboratory in a matter of months. The efficient way (really, an efficient Way, a Dao, a Cosmos, a sacred-creative-ordering) to make a tomato involves roundness, but to the human agenda, a cube-shaped tomato is more efficient: One can pack more of them in the rectilinear boxes we use, and one can rationally proportion the tomato to square bread.[2]  

Similarly, we can get a BA and a PhD in less than a decade, but even a decade of serious spiritual practice seems like a lot to the ego, and we imagine we have nothing to learn from such a practice, we imagine no radical shift in our way of knowing could really come from it—from doing things like repeating mantras, engaging in rituals over and over again, participating in ceremonies and rites, creating thousands of mandalas, performing thousands of prostrations or circumambulations, and, of course, practicing thousands upon thousands of hours of meditation, indeed, practicing all the other elements as meditation— and we assume, in practice, that we can learn anything we really want to learn from concepts and arguments and experiments in laboratories, that we can learn in the abstract, taking in information and using time as we see fit. This often arises in subtle ways, because of its near total pervasiveness. It goes altogether with our style of consciousness, and thus fabricates almost the whole of our experience. 

The Daoist philosopher Liu I-Ming wrote: 

The human mind is the progenitor of all mundanities; once the human mind is gone, accumulated mundanities evaporate, “light arises in the empty room,”[3] and true celestial energy gradually approaches restoration. But before refinement of the self is perfected, the mind is not empty and the light is not true; negativity and mundanity still have not withdrawn completely, and one cannot seek their end in a hurry. If one does not know the firing process and rushes to achieve settlement, this is still the human mentality acting, working with false understanding . . . As long as the human mentality is not gone, [the Mind of the Way] does not become manifest. (translation by Cleary, 1986: 233). 

This is like saying that, with our habitual mind and our typical thinking, we produce mundanities, banalities, profanities, distractions of all kinds, and we do this altogether with time. Time is a mundanity and also a precondition for mundanity. Likewise, mundanities are a precondition of time. It all goes altogether. And we might say that something else goes altogether as the realization of sacredness.  

Bohm invites us to see that we cannot function coherently according to this misunderstanding of time that goes altogether with the mundane and its sufferings: 

Bohm: What suggests itself is that psychologically—and perhaps eventually for the deepest level physically—we can’t use time as the essence. Rather, the moment now is the essence, because all the past and the future that we ever will know are in this moment. The past and the future are now—namely, in so far as it has left any impression, whatever has happened is now. And our expectations are now. Thus we could say that now may be the starting point.  

One picture you could make of an electron would be that it sort of flashes into and out of existence so fast that when picked up in the usual equipment it looks continuously existent. It might have a certain regularity, so that it appears to obey an order of necessity. But it might be that it is basically creative; the creative act may create this order of necessity. 

Q: Would that mean that any time we escape from the now we are trying to change what is necessary? 

Bohm: We are trying to push the order of necessity into the time order. We’re trying to make a change in this order. But we are in an area where that sort of abstraction, or that sort of representation, cannot work. Even in physics we have to admit that this was always a representation, that the actual experience was always now. (237) 

Captain Clock commands us to make our insanity a necessity. We try to make the time order the ordering of Nature, the sacred-creative-ordering of Sophia. But, again, Sophia will not tolerate our agendas. She demands that we attune ourselves to Her. Thus, we should make our rhythmic order in attunement with the sacred-creative-ordering of things, and not the other way around, as we now have it. Everyday people call this, “ass backward”. The dominant culture is ass backward—with its “rationality” and “efficiency” stuck somewhere up that backwardness. 

We thus live in a system of thinking—an ecology of mind, an ecology of thinking, an ecology of heart-mind-body-world-cosmos—organized on the basis of cutting itself and us off from life, from the living, loving, sacred-creative-ordering of necessity, the lively patterning of relationality (which takes priority over what we call “rationality).  

The dominant culture is an ecology of insanity, an ecology of delusion, for we do not have the choice to place our agenda on top of the necessities of life—and oh how our culture loathes the thought of not having all the choices in the universe, not having the illusion of choice (for instance, as manifest in 15 different kinds of toothpaste and 30 different SUVs —US News had a piece on “30 SUVs Worth Waiting for in 2019,” a rather asinine suggestion, though perhaps quite a few readers out of a hundred would not find the headline silly enough[4]). 

The limiting necessities of ignorance—including fear, craving, self-doubt, and all the medications we use to treat them, like war, debt, political circuses, doctor’s bills, family fights, endless agendas, endless “choices” in the marketplace that functions as our ecology, and the rampant degradation of Nature and the soul—none of these necessities can override the necessities of life, and only when we attune with that will we fulfill our function, receiving it from Nature herself (perhaps “the only true answer,” coming from the very sacredness of Nature, coming, in religious terms, intimately from the divine as the divine manifests here in this living, loving world).[5] Instead of synchronizing our clocks with arbitrary time, we need to Synchronize the Soul with being-time, the living moment, the Nature of life. That puts things too poetically, but puts them precisely enough if we turn to verification by means of practice-and-realization. What would we verify? Among other things, a different experience of time, one that itself requires a rebellion against the clock to practice-and-realize. 

Dogen’s invitation to enter the moment, the yes-moment, the being-moment, echoes something we can find in the ancient west as well. Hadot was fond of Goethe’s line, “The present alone is our joy.” It comes from Part II of his Faust, in a lovely scene in which Faust and Helen speak to each other in rhyme, in rhythm and song. Faust says to Helen, “And so the spirit [or mind, or soul] looks neither ahead nor behind. The present alone . . .” And Helen answers, “is our joy.” She later says she is, “trusting myself to the unknown” (from Hadot 1986: 62). Hadot sees in this a reflection of Goethe’s understanding of philosophy as a way of life: 

For Goethe, in fact, who says so in a letter to Zelter, this is characteristic of ancient life and art: knowing how to live in the present, knowing what he calls the “the health of the moment”. In Antiquity, he says, the instant was “pregnant”, that is filled with significance, but also experienced in its full reality, in all its fullness and richness, sufficient unto itself. We no longer know how to live in the present, Goethe continues. For us the ideal lies in the future and can only be the object of a nostalgic desire, while the present is considered trivial and banal. We no longer know how to take advantage of the present, we no longer, as the Greeks did, know “trusting myself to the unknown” (63-4). 

Entrance into the unknown and the inconceivable stand out as essential to a spiritual/philosophical life. Conquest consciousness cannot abide unknowns, and it operates on the basis of manipulation and control. A better way of knowing involves allowing the unknown to become part of our knowing, our sacred gnosis. Knowledge in relation to conquest consciousness always remains an object, but a better way of knowing must get beyond the subject/object divide. Habitual mind creates the abyss, and the joyful, peaceful, wise, and beautiful heart crosses it. 

In the passage above, Hadot reveals a sensibility to time that resonates with the one Dogen invites us to practice and realize—and we must emphasize that this is a realization, an achievement, a consummation, and not merely a “conception”.[6] Hadot offers some further thoughts in this regard, and we can allow “antique” and “antiquity” to resonate with Jung’s reflections. Thus “antique Beauty” is also “antique Wisdom,” “antique philosophy”. It is LoveWisdom. 

And in fact, if Faust speaks to Helen as a man of Antiquity, it is because the presence of Helen, that is, the presence of antique Beauty, reveals to him what the present is in itself: what the present of the world is, “the splendid feeling of the present”, Herrliches Ferfühl der Gegenwartas the Oriental Divan says.

And this is why the dialogue between Faust and Helen can be understood at a third level. It is no longer the dialogue between two lovers, it is no longer the dialogue between two historical figures, but it is the dialogue of man with himself. The encounter with Helen is not just the encounter with antique Beauty which emanates from nature: it is also the encounter with a living wisdom, with a way of living, this “health of the moment” we just mentioned.  

We must now define the experience of time in Antiquity as expressed in the verses of Faust we have just discussed. We might think, looking at Goethe’s letter to Zelter mentioned earlier, that it is a general experience common to Antiquity and that it was natural for men of Antiquity to know what Goethe called “the health of the moment”. Moreover, following Goethe many historians and philosophers, from Oswald Spengler to the logician Hintika, have alluded to the fact that the Greeks “lived in the present moment” more than did representatives of other cultures. In his book Die Zauberflöte, Siegfried Morenz summarizes this idea when he writes, “This particular feature of Greece has never been better characterized than by Goethe . . . at the occasion of the dialogue between Faust and Helen: ‘And so the spirit looks neither ahead nor behind. The present alone is our joy’”. It must certainly be admitted that the Greeks in general paid special attention to the present moment, attention that could also assume several ethical and artistic meanings. Popular wisdom counselled both being content with the present and knowing how to use it well. On the one hand being content with the present meant in particular being content with earthly life, and this is what Goethe admired in ancient art, especially funerary art. The deceased was not represented with eyes raised toward heaven but accomplishing acts from his normal daily existence. On the other hand, knowing how to use the present well meant knowing how to recognize and make use of the favorable and decisive moment, kairos, that is, all the possibilities contained in one or another moment. The strategist knows how to strike at the right moment, and the sculptor fixes in marble the most significant instant of the scene he wished to bring to life. The Greeks, it seemed, paid particular attention to the present moment. But we should not, like Winckelmann, Goethe or Hölderlin, imagine an idealized Greece whose citizens lived in the present moment and as a result were constantly bathed in beauty and serenity. In fact men of Antiquity were distressed and they worried quite like we do. Ancient poetry often reflects their anxiety, which sometimes even becomes despair. Like us they bore the burden of the past, the uncertainty of the future, a fear of death. It is this human anguish which ancient philosophies, particularly Epicureanism and Stoicism, sought to remedy. They were therapies destined to heal anguish or to provide liberty and self-control, a means of freeing one-self from the past and from the future so as to live in the present. The experience of time is totally different from the common and general one we just described. And this experience, as we shall see, corresponds exactly to that expressed in the verses of Faust: “The present alone is our joy”. “Do not reflect on your destiny. To exist is an obligation”. This is a philosophical conversion which implies a voluntary and radical transformation of one’s way of living and of seeing the world. This is the true “health of the moment” leading to serenity. (64-5) 

Hadot tries to show that, despite significant differences in doctrine, the Epicurean and Stoic traditions share a commitment to a practice of life that involves a different way of knowing self, world, and time. There is a completeness and a great perfection in the moment, and many philosophical/spiritual traditions invite us to touch it, to enter it as a more skillful and realistic practice and realization of life. It seems to have to do with something more real than our agendas. And simply “thinking” this will not suffice. Though ancient Greek society may have had a place for the general notion of being-moment or yes-moment, the ancient philosophers realized that, in practice, this meant a rebellion against a culture already at odds with the spirit of such wisdom. They realized the need for practice and transformative insight to make an alternative way of knowing real. 

To put this in relation to popular culture: Long before the likes of Eckhart Tolle, ancient philosophers in the dominant culture realized “the power of now,” and they developed entire schools dedicated to teaching it—along with, and this has become more crucial than ever—a critique of the larger culture that seduces us out of the sacred now and into calendars and clocks, agendas and purposes, hopes and fears, cravings and confusions. As least some of the philosophers of old and of today realize the importance of transforming the culture, healing the fevers and delusions of conquest consciousness, putting an end to militarism and aggression that comes altogether with economic inequality and the style of thinking that degrades ecologies and denudes the soul.

With the help of these suggestions, we can return to Dogen: 

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, we should not regard firewood as the before and ash as the after [of “some thing”]. Understand that firewood dwells in the reality place of firewood, which fully includes before and after and is free of before and after. Ash dwells in the reality place of ash, which fully includes before and after. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, a human being does not return to birth after death. 

This being so, the traditional way in Buddhist LoveWisdom denies that birth turns into death. Accordingly, birth is understood as no-birth. It is an unshakable teaching in the Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth. Accordingly, death is understood as no-death. 

Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring: We do not think winter turns into spring or say spring turns into summer. (adapted from the translation by Abe and Waddell) 

Dogen’s view of “things not becoming something” can at first seem strange. But in fact it not only seems familiar to many spiritual traditions (and perhaps familiar to someone thinking as Bohm invited us to think about, for instance, the being of electrons), it might seem matter-of-fact in some Indigenous Cultures. For instance, compare Dogen’s contemplations with Dorothy Lee’s discussion of Trobriander Culture: 

. . . there is a series of beings, but no becoming. There is no temporal connection between objects. The taytu [a species of yam] always remains itself; it does not become over-ripe; over-ripeness is an ingredient of another, a different being. At some point, the taytu turns into a yowana, which contains over-ripeness. And the yowana, over-ripe as it is, does not put forth shoots, does not become a sprouting yowana. When sprouts appear, it ceases to be itself; in its place appears a silasata. Neither is there a temporal connection made—or, according to our own premises, perceived—between events; in fact, temporality is meaningless. There are no tenses, no linguistic distinction between past or present. There is no arrangement of activities or events into means and ends, no causal or teleologic relationships. What we consider a causal relationship in a sequence of connected events, is to the Trobriander an ingredient of a patterned whole. (1950: 91) 

Just as Dogen invites us to see that firewood does not become ashes, the Trobriander Culture invites us to see that a ripe yam does not become an overripe yam (and perhaps a certain kind of scientist would invite us to sense the discontinuities in radiation or certain other quantum phenomena—and, of course, we now have some awareness that quantum phenomena may play a surprising role in biology). Lee tries to get around “become” by using “turn into,” but this only shows the limits of both typical western thinking and a typical western language. In the passage from Dogen, we find both a rejection of “become” and a rejection of “turn into.” Lee herself acknowledges some of this:  

We who are accustomed to seek lineal continuity, cannot help supplying it as we read . . . but the continuity is not given in the Trobriand text; and all Trobriand speech, according to Malinowski, is “jerky,” given in points, not in connecting lines. The only connective I know of in Trobriand is the pela which I mentioned above; a kind of preposition which also means “to jump.” (Lee, 1950: 92) 

The potentially discontinuous Nature of reality (suggested not only in these passages, but also by modern physics, as Bohm pointed out) must strike us as strange (and, it may prove all the more challenging to resist thinking of this in a simple dualistic opposition to “continuous”). That strangeness comes from our having gotten hooked by certain habits of mind. As Nietzsche put it: 

Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny. Such erroneous articles of faith . . . include the following: that there are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in itself. It was only very late that such propositions were denied and doubted; it was only very late that truth emerged-as the weakest form of knowledge. It seemed that one was unable to live with it: our organism was prepared for the opposite; all its higher functions, sense perception, and every kind of sensation worked with those basic errors which had been incorporated since time immemorial. Indeed, even in the realm of knowledge these propositions became the norms according to which “true” and “untrue,” were determined down to the most remote regions of logic. (GS 110, emphasis added) 

Returning to the strange question: Firewood doesn’t become ashes? No. Not if there is no firewood (no such “thing” as “firewood”), not if time is not “time” but moment, the being-moment. Everything that is is moment, and moment is everything that is. We ordinarily project onto our experience. But each moment is unique. Things cannot be grasped. We cannot lay a hand on this Now, cannot lay a hand on any “thing,” yet the sheer intimacy means we cannot not touch it.  

Don’t we “see” “things” though? Don’t we “refer” to “things” when we speak? In the Perfection of Wisdom literature (Prajnaparamita), we see references to “no perception,” “no conception,” “no conventional expression”. Language cannot circumscribe reality.[7] It is interwoven into reality, which is meaningfulness “all the way down,” so to speak.  

Nietzsche speaks about language as a narrowing force, if we are not careful with it, and he means by that our tendency toward a mindless use of language that takes away from the lived vitality of experience, in which meaning can never be “fixed,” and thus we turn the rare and beautiful into the coarse and common. We can begin to see how “time” and everything that goes with it drives mindless talking. We don’t have time to speak. So we chit-chat, mindlessly. And quickly, while looking at the clock. 

Since life is fresh and new, perfect and complete as each moment, then if I use an expression you understand in any habitual manner, it cannot express what arises Now. Expressions can be appropriate or skillful and/or liberating, but they cannot capture—all the more so since experience continues fleetingly, and there is always more—ever-more. We only need liberation into this impermanence, this open relationality, this ever-more. Experience doesn’t “exist” anywhere as something solid, and therefore nothing can lay hold of it. Thus there is no “deferral” either. There is no need to “defer” anything. The experience has no root, therefore it doesn’t “refer” to any “thing”. It doesn’t refer to “me” or “you”. When some experience arises, if we project subject and object, then we think the language refers to one or refers between.  

If we want to find the fragrance of a rose in the Cosmos, we should not look in the rose or in the person smelling the rose. The fragrance of rose, the smelling-of-rose, co-arises as the Cosmos, co-arises as the sacred-creative-ordering, presencing the archetypal, the synchronistic, the interwovenness of all things. It is not even something arising “between” the rose and the person smelling it. Those entities are not solid. It is not an interaction between “things” (we can recall here Dewey’s efforts, and Bentley’s too, to get us to move beyond “interactionism,” a vision of the universe as “things” “interacting,” and to invite us to sense what we might call a “transactional cosmos,” a sacred-creative-ordering that unfolds in mutually dependent transformation, mutually dependent moment-happenings or being-moments). The fragrance of rose is the Cosmos. It is all of time, right Now. It is PracticeRealization. As the being-moment, the YesMoment, the one smelling the rose is the fragrance of the rose, and the rose, and the Sun, sky, mountains, rivers, Earth, the rain that fell, the bugs that aerated the soil, the soil, the soul, the bliss of just this.  

The smell of the rose is not a concept, nor an activity that “takes place” “in time”. We may project concepts onto this miracle, this moment of magic, this mandala of the soul, but our habitual ways of thinking and speaking always end up missing the rose, missing our life—we are missing something all the time, and we usually do everything we can to repress the grief of it, to medicate the whole mass of suffering that is this missing, to push away the soul’s call to STOP this missing.  

Life does not function by means of concepts as we think of concepts. Life has manifested tremendous creativity without concepts and equations. We have written books, and life invented the being who can write books—without arguments or abstractions, without clocks or agendas, without hope or fear, without clinging, craving, or confusion. If we think the divine made everything, the same holds true.  

We have begun to develop dynamical systems theories and tools, but how can we cultivate the kind of science that can put us in touch with this? Our current science lacks the sophistication to do so. Plenty of mythologies have all the sophistication we would need in order to become wise, compassionate, present, and graceful, and thus to unleash the healing, hallowing flow of wisdom, love, and beauty into the barren landscapes of the soul and the battered landscapes of the World. 

We should of course acknowledge again that there is an aspect of life that allows something like generalization. Life is not mere “chaos”. Life is unique, and yet has regularities and rhythms. There is nothing but practice-realization, and thus even Cosmic “habits” can emerge (we could even think of things like gravity this way). This acknowledgement itself involves practice-realization, and it does not allow us to control or manage the world. Instead it challenges us with the spiritual imperative to cultivate wisdom, discernment, attunement, so that we can align ourselves with vitalizing powers of the sacred-creative-ordering of life. 

Because of our clocks (better put: altogether with our clocks), we have little time to touch this sacred-creative-ordering. Its jubilance can seem like chaos to us, for it does not always coincide with human notions of “order,” and it does not cater to human agendas, to human fears, cravings, and self-doubts. We feel too rushed to just sit, just commune and communicate with forests, rivers, mountains, oceans, places alive and alove. In a relative sense, we have to slow down. We have to stop all our doing, which takes place in time. But, in the midst of our doings, the doings of time, purpose, and agenda, the world can seem chaotic, and its chaos in fact further “justifies” our attempts at management and exploitation (we actually speak of “natural resource management,” as if we clever humans can manage the world, and as if the world amounted to a store of “resources” available for us to manage and distribute as we see fit). As Hans Peter Duerr puts it:  

People do not exploit a nature that speaks to them. But a nature that, as two famous nineteenth-century ethnocentrics expressed it, ‘faced humans initially as an entirely foreign, all-powerful and unassailable might, towards which they behaved as animals, and which they allowed to lord it over them as if they were brutes’; such a nature has no language of its own any more, it is merely matter. (1985: 92) 

It takes a leap beyond time in order to commune with the World, to hear its voice, to arrive at intimacy with the sacred-creative-patterning—by which we mean those larger loops, circles, and cycles, the larger ecologies of mind hinted at in our contemplation of Bateson’s critique of conscious human purpose.  

Let us Consider the way Nietzsche puts our deafness, and his somewhat unskillful attempt to challenge it:  

The total character of the world, however, is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms . . . Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish to become any of these things; it does not by any means strive to imitate man . . . Let us beware of saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands, nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses.  (GS 109) 

Here Nietzsche manages cleverness, but not much wisdom. He verges into nihilism and cynicism (in the pejorative sense). The passage holds value for the way in which it expresses the sort of bad thinking Nietzsche seemed to want us to liberate ourselves from. But, because he found ways to tap into what we might call the wondrous creative mind, he mimics the great Chinese sage Laozi: 

When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other.

Difficult and easy support each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master

acts without doing anything

and teaches without saying anything.

Things arise and she lets them come;

things disappear and she lets them go.

She has but doesn’t possess,

acts but doesn’t expect.

When her work is done, she forgets it.

That is why it lasts forever. (Dao De Jing, chapter 2)[8] 

Laozi shows how the living Cosmos arises as a unity of opposites (a version of which Nietzsche, and later Jung—in part under Nietzsche’s influence—sought to practice-realize and express). The Cosmos itself “does not take sides,” (as Laozi puts it in chapter 5 of his work), but that does not mean it lacks wisdom or sacred-creative-ordering. Rather, no human can realize wisdom unless they attune themselves with that.  

What we call “wisdom,” “love,” “beauty,” and all the other good and bad things we wring our hands over have to do with a mind out of attunement with the Way (Dao, dharma, logos, Sophia, LoveWisdom, the sacred), and we can call the Arts of Awareness (or “spiritual exercises”) the practice-and-realization of attunement—attunement with the sacred, with the mystery, with the divine, with wisdom, love, and beauty. Nietzsche perhaps let himself go into polemics and provocations. He seems to have struggled valiantly to arrive at a functional nondualistic philosophy, but he never quite managed it. 

In any case, we can say the world may appear chaotic and amoral to us. Freud, in Future of an Illusion, went so far as to claim that, “the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’ȇtre, is to defend us against nature” (19). To defend against, as if we shall maintain a state of war with the necessities of life, putting ourselves at war with ourselves—because we have no time to listen, to learn, to feel, to sense, to attune? 

Confronted with a seemingly mute and meaningless Nature, and/or experiencing ourselves as uninterested in or intimidated by the sacred-creative-patterning—the necessities of Nature—we foist our agenda onto the world, including our sense of time. Nietzsche puts it in the most general terms: 

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live—by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error. (GS 121) 

He left out time. And he faltered in his dancing a bit: We arranged a world that we think we need, the ground we think we must have under us, the manipulation and control we must have in our grasp, in order to live comfortably and “happily” (the “happiness” we chase as part of our delusion), by a process of cutting ourselves off from life and treating the deluded necessities of our ignorance, the anxious and confused necessities of our hopes, fears, angers, jealousies, greeds, and self-doubts as “natural law” or some other false image of the necessities of life (i.e. as “rational,” as “spiritual,” as part of the “law of attraction,” as part of “human nature,” as a matter of “economic fact,” and all the rest). 

Nietzsche also errs here in suggesting that the conditions of life include “error”. Error does not appear in any ordinary sense, and the sense of error we most need to attend to has human foci.  

For instance, Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz published a paper in 1983 in Austral Entomology titled, “Beetles on the Bottle.” The two scientists had come across male jewel beetles trying desperately to mate with beer bottles—so desperately they were allowing themselves to be eaten by ants in the process. It seemed that little bumps (tubercles) on a certain kind of brown glass beer bottle tricked the male beetles into seeing incredibly voluptuous and enticing females. They would cling to the bottles and not let go in their attempt to cultivate life forward, to realize life, in their sacred activity.  

We may say the beetles erred: They saw females where we see beer bottles. But beer bottles—especially those strewn about the landscape as garbage, and even more especially ones that look like beetles, perhaps in no small part because there are such beetles whose souls attune with said tubercles and whose souls co-arise with ours (i.e. beetles who do not exist in separation from the human psyche)—such beer bottles do not “belong” in the landscape, as a matter of sacred necessity. I recall sitting in a conference, listening to a talk by a very intelligent cognitive scientist who had the whole room laughing over this poor beetle’s apparent “stupidity,” and no one for a moment paused to ask if the stupidity belonged more to humanity than to beetles. If we find errors of perception in the story, we must ask why, and then where we should inquire to dispel them. 

What kind of thinking permits the mass-production of an addictive hepato- and neurotoxin that tends to go altogether with poor decisions and needless suffering? What kind of thinking permits a being to throw its trash into ecologies in which it doesn’t belong? Beer bottles do not benefit the landscape—at least not when strewn about in neglect. Perhaps we could find some way to make wise, loving, and beautiful use of them. That would demand consulting with the sacred necessities of life. 

And, let us make clear: Which being first fell in love with those beer bottles, and couldn’t let go of them even if it cost them their well-being, even their life, as well as the health and even the lives of others? Humans have as much infatuation with beer bottles as beetles do, and this human infatuation violates sacred necessities. 

Let us also note that our language encourages us to see “objects” called “beer bottles,” which we can throw into a field of space. A language that encouraged honesty and which guided us into relationality and interwovenness (really, the same thing as “honesty”) might evoke the activity of throwing a bottle into a field or other part of the landscape something like this “by-way-of-neglectful-transfer-move-ing that-atomize-ing young-yet-state-of-ing this-sacredness-violate-ing become-contain-ing-facilitate-ing for make-ing-stupid-yet-and-unwell-addict-ing-yet-state-of-ing.” Instead of “beer bottle,” we need an evocation that the container holds a toxin that compromises thinking and well-being of ourselves and of larger ecologies. One can barely come up with an appropriate evocation, and English reveals itself as cumbersome and rather inept.  

We somehow want to call littering with beer bottles a violation of sacredness and of sacred necessities, and we should want to point out that the “beer bottle” is not an object, but a dynamic relation between a human and themselves, between humans and other humans, between humans and the world (including the divine or any reasonable sense of sacredness), and we should want to convey that, at least in the dominant culture, that bottle contains a kind of stupid sauce, one that gets people addicted, and in general leads to compromised synchronization between heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos. It gets us out of synch. In the best case, it gets us out of synch with the very mind that creates our problems. But it proves highly ineffective at liberating us into well-being. 

In a similar case, we can consider how the typical horse’s reaction to plastic—especially in the form of plastic bags, plastic tarps, plastic clothing (e.g. a poncho), or umbrellas—seems “irrational” to us clever humans: Upon perceiving plastic, the typical horse will want to bolt. But, while we rational geniuses mock this supposed irrationality of Horse, while we may say, along with certain cognitive scientists, that Horse has apparently incorporated error in some way, deeper inquiry can open us to the insight that Horse’s response makes sense—far, far more sense than it makes to release so much plastic into the landscape, into the living, loving World, into sophisticated ecologies where the absence of plastic attunes with sacred necessity and the presence of plastic leads to so many negative side-effects, including an alarming number of wild animal deaths and general toxification.

We are murdering wild animals and making them unwell—not because of any necessity, but simply because of our stupidity and our agendas, our stuckness in a style of consciousness unable and basically unwilling to attune with wisdom, love, and beauty to the extent demanded by life itself, by the sacred necessities inscribed by the divine or by the thoughtful, mysterious, and magical patterning of life. 

We call this stuff “plastic,” which only reveals its relation to human agendas. Human agendas adore things that human egos can manipulate and control. A better name would be something along the lines of, “sacredness-violate-ing become-crave-ing-facilitate-ing-and-continue-yet-harm-ing many-relation-yet-state-of-ing.” In other words, plastic is a relational activity based on violating sacred necessities, violating the sanctity of ecologies and the larger community of life for the purpose of fulfilling narrow human purposes, with consequences that affect the larger community of life (all our relations, including fish, birds, and so on) for centuries. 

What has this to do with time, with clocks? It has everything to do with time, first and foremost because humans have incorporated their misunderstanding of time (brought it into their bodies, their communication, and their general thought and activity), and the misunderstanding of time affects our use of ourselves and our World. Our incorporated misunderstanding of time perpetuates Sorrowville’s pattern of insanity.  

For instance, to take an obvious and surface-level interwovenness, plastic saves time.[9] How many of us—even those who have thankfully begun to respond to plastic as Horse does—how many of us have given in to a plastic this or that, because of apparent necessity—often a necessity that comes to, “I don’t have time for any reasonable alternative”?  

I have in certain moments behaved almost as if the soul had a violent repulsion to plastic, and yet too often found myself giving in to this or that item, such as an herbal remedy (in a plastic container) for allergies too insufferable to sleep and work well, or, of course, the plastic in the few bits of technology I own, and obviously the plastic that becomes garbage as a result of a medical procedure, such as having blood work done. In writing a doctoral dissertation, I could not use the trackpad on the laptop in a skillful way given the amount of work I needed to do with it in the time available, and my body began to manifest negative side-effects (significant pain in “hand,” “fingers,” “wrist,” “arm”). It made sense to get a plastic mouse. The plastic mouse simply goes together with the laptop, and the work could proceed quite well after that, much more efficiently.  

That seems to me a mildly horrifying story, since the plastic from the mouse might end up being around for thousands of years, even if I attempt to recycle it when it eventually breaks (they don’t seem to last long, even with care). If we think of the whole lifecycle of the laptop and mouse, it puts a heavy demand on each writer to say something quite rebellious and meaningful. How many of us are up to the task? Will anything here lead to revolution?  

All of this nonsense works efficiently, rationally. The efficient and the rational go together in practice, and this too shows the altogetherness of time in our thinking, which allows us to think-with-plastic, to engage in plastic thinking, the artificial, cut-off-from-life-thinking that gives us no pause as we exploit and degrade the living World, including our own ecologies. It seems as though we somehow operate as if we are just thinking—admittedly . . . on the clock and with plastic around. We don’t seem to open up enough to the possibility that the incorporation of thinking-on-the-clock and thinking-with-plastic amounts to a degraded thinking, and that we cannot see this very clearly because of the incorporation.  

In other words: We just call it “thinking,” but in fact it’s a degraded thinking, and its degraded nature remains invisible to us. Sadly, our most important insights in life, insights that seem to change us dramatically, insights that may come with incredible laughter or tears, often leave us with no sense of just how deluded we might still be.

We have no conscientious alternative to verifying our thinking in the broadest, most inclusive, and most ecologically and spiritually rigorous manner. The philosopher John Dewey seems to have noticed the importance of evaluating all our thinking on the basis of all of its consequences, which we see evident in the state of the world, the state of our bodies and minds, the state of our loved ones, the state of strangers, the state of all our relations and the wondrous community of life. In terms of evaluating the habitual thinking of conquest consciousness, it is like stopping the thinking we do with a computer mouse because the mouse itself seems to be malfunctioning, but it’s much more intimate, because we must somehow see that we are malfunctioning. 

Even in realms of relative wisdom we can find thinking-with-plastic and its concomitant misunderstanding of time. A monastic community whose founder I deeply admire sells a meditation cushion made of “memory foam”. The cushions have been available for over a decade, and perhaps by now they make use of so-called “green” polyurethane, but they don’t advertise it that way, and most memory foam comes from petroleum (and historically that came first, so they started out offering petroleum cushions), which means it will not functionally biodegrade—in other words, the product betrays a resistance to “time,” a mind caught up in clocks and conquest.  

A meditation cushion, or anything else, that doesn’t functionally biodegrade makes no real sense, and yet this monastic community advertises the cushion as more or less “indestructible”. That this thinking comes from a tradition that emphasizes both impermanence and interwovenness shows again how intellectual understanding will never function for us. Life demands tremendous clarity. Ironically, this monastic community came from Dogen’s lineage, a lineage emphasizing Dogen’s inescapable demand that we enter the yes-moment, the existence-moment, and that we synchronize and harmonize with all things, both sentient and insentient—all sentient beings and all of sentient being.  

We could clarify some of this as follows: We should see as unwise anything humans produce that doesn’t nourish the conditions of life.  

Where does our production of texts stand from such a perspective—our production of poems, stories, arguments, analyses? How about our production of equations, theories, data, art, airplanes, rockets, automobiles, cell phones, beer bottles, plastic bags, stock trades, exercise equipment? What do we make—what do we co-discover-create—with our living practice of LoveWisdom? What kind of world do we make, together with all the other beings who have a right to their wholeness and holiness too?  

Again, these things arise altogether with our misunderstanding of time. Where there is “time,” there is eventually busyness—too much busyness to pause, to dispel any deep delusions, to listen deeply to the soul and to the Earth and her beings, to take a stand for wisdom, love, and beauty. Busyness in the dominant culture goes together with economic imperatives—which, again, do not align with ecological imperatives, or with any imperatives we might see as sacred. We have incorporated all these delusions, and thus they do not easily dispel, even if they would dispel in a moment, upon our entrance of moment, our realization of moment.

In his book Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman offers us some provocative contemplations that bear on these aspects (and others) of our inquiry: 

The !Kung people miraculously survived as a community of free human beings into our own exterminating age. R.E. Leakey observed them in their lush African forest homeland. They cultivated nothing except themselves. They made themselves what they wished to be. They were not determined by anything beyond their own being—not by alarm clocks, not by debts, not by orders from superiors. They feasted and celebrated and played, full-time, except when they slept. They shared everything with their communities: food, experiences, visions, songs. Great personal satisfaction, deep inner joy, came from the sharing. 

(In today’s world, wolves still experience the joys that come from sharing. Maybe that’s why governments pay bounties to the killers of wolves.) 

S. Diamond observed other free human beings who survived into our age, also in Africa. He could see that they did no work, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it in English. Instead, he said they made no distinction between work and play. Does Diamond mean that the activity of the free people can be seen as work one moment, as play another, depending on how the anthropologist feels? Does he mean that they didn’t know if their activity was work or play? Does he mean we, you and I, Diamond’s armored contemporaries, cannot distinguish their work from their play? 

If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we’re playing. Why else would we be there?[10] 

Why else? Why would we clock in or otherwise record our presence someplace, in order to engage in physically and mentally repetitive work, often work we find meaningless, often work in conditions of limited autonomy and direct democratic participation, often in a manner not conducive to health (the health of our bodies, minds, relationships, and world), typically with no spiritual context and often antithetical to the spiritual values we ourselves claim to hold dear, and lacking any practices that would further our spiritual development? Of course, we can keep in mind here Dinwoodie’s account of the development of western time, as an industrial practice, some of which we touched on in the contemplation, The Insidious Captain Clock and His Mechanized Conquest of the Soul. 

How hard would we have to work if we attuned Nature and Culture? Anthropologist Jared Diamond offers some thoughts in his infamous essay on “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race”. Though developing and employing—and then proliferating—nuclear weapons or bringing the global climate into collapse might seem like examples of almost incomprehensible ignorance, Diamond suggests that many such subsequent errors may be seen as consequent errors, depending crucially on the foundation of this rather significant one: That we traded the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (exemplified by the !Kung) for our “civilized” life. It may seem that we have derived all manner of benefits; the case does not seem so easy to weigh: 

While the case for the progressivist view [that agriculture was true progress, and that we have made all manner of progress only because of it—n.p.] seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” 

 . . .  In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s. 

 . . . . Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. 

 . . . . At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150 . . . Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a threefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. 

We may think that we have solved some of these problems. Clearly, we have better longevity and less malnutrition today, right? Diamond’s essay can provoke us to pause and think about “progress”. What does it really mean? And what has come along with it? Furthermore—and perhaps this question matters most of all—what progress might arise if we cultivated life forward in a totally different way? In other words: Though “civilized culture” claims “progress,” what might have happened if the developmental process had unfolded with the spiritual approach of the best Indigenous Cultures, rather than the culture of the west? And what happens if we keep any of our more important progress (e.g. the expansion of ethical responsibility) and shift with it into a more vitalizing context? 

At this point, we have raised daunting questions about the way we speak, especially in relation to words that drive our culture’s thinking and activity, which means words that drive our own thinking and activity as well, words like: 

Time

Health

Civilization

Progress

Plastic

Money

Thinking

Mind

Body

Addiction

Intelligence

Stupidity

Rationality

Irrationality

Self/Organism

Ecology/Environment

Convenience

Efficiency 

We can put a very basic question to ourselves and our culture: Does our way of speaking, thinking, and taking action in the world weave us into a hologram, a living/loving ecogram, a mandala of magic and mystery—or does it place us into a mechanism, a Cartesian space, a landscape of agendas and resources for achieving our agendas, a matrix of clocks and calendars, a cycle of hopes and fears, cravings and confusions, stresses and traumas? Do we speak like we participate in a flow of meaningfulness that has a priority over all our partial meanings, or do we speak to send messages and convey information? Do we speak like people awake to interwovenness, aware of the way our thinking, speaking, and activity make a world together with all beings? Do we speak like singing, playing, dancing a participatory mystery, or do we speak like dictating tactics in a campaign of conquest, acquisition, gain and loss, praise and blame, pleasure and pain, fame and ill-repute (or even anonymity)? We have seen that these are not just questions for our manner or style of speaking, but questions of our style of consciousness, and also questions about the structure of our language. The Indo-Europoean languages may seduce us into error, and help to keep up a subtle resistance to reality, because of the style of thinking, speaking, and acting they seem to facilitate. It takes conscientious practice to liberate ourselves into our fullest potential for realizing wisdom, love, and beauty.

[1] http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/11/delusion.html

[2] We have in fact engineered cube-shaped tomatoes and watermelons. Many modified organisms exist now—by which we tend to mean, “modified to fit human agendas,” something that should strike us, by now, as quite reasonably suspicious from the outset, suspicious as a matter of structure, suspicious as a matter of systemic currents. A genetic engineer who developed a cube-shaped tomato, upon being told it didn’t taste like a real tomato, allegedly replied, “Yes, but very soon, everybody who knows what a real tomato should taste like will be dead, and nobody will know.” https://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/4/video_extended_interview_with_vandana_shiva

[3] Rumi would say, “Music arises from the empty lute.” Sophia does not want to play an instrument with mundanities packed in where spaciousness should be. Sophia plays only the empty lute.

[4] https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/suvs-worth-waiting-for

[5] As Jung put it: “after many years of the hardest practice and the most strenuous demolition of rational understanding, the Zen devotee receives an answer—the only true answer—from Nature herself . . . As one can see for oneself, it is the naturalness of the answer that strikes one most . . .” (CW11, para. 901)

[6] Forgive the play on words, but one wonders again and again about the abstractions of vitality in an ecology of insanity.

[7] Heidegger’s notion that “language is the house of being” gets sensibly transformed into “Being is the Home of Language,” or perhaps, “language is the house of ego.” In any case, the typical notions of language that rule in the dominant culture seem inadequate, and we need more emphasis on the limitations these impose on the HeartMindBodyWorldCosmos. The function of language is compassion. The essence of meaningfulness is wisdom. But indeed meaning is always constituted by wisdom-love-beauty.

[8] https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html#Kap81

[9] We might add that seeing the stupidity of plastic, once we have become insane enough to make it and let it pervade the World, demands timelessness that goes together with a sense of deep time (we now try to rush toward the latter, as a way of counterbalancing our stuckness in the hedonic present and in limited notions of time, but this new “deep time” is often just a refiguring of clocks, not a rebellion against them).

[10] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan