"Бенарес берет реванш"

[orientproject]

"Мы являемся свидетелями быстро протекающей смены верований. Дело, конечно, не в том, что люди начинают сверяться со знаками Зодиака, отличают год "золотого Дракона" от "металлической Лошади". Миллионы людей утратили христианское видение мира, они пытаются соединить свою научно-техническую цивилизацию с парапсихологией, целительством, астрологией,

Comments

[orientproject]

Athens and Benares

Every morning it is the same for me, a struggle between 'Athens' and 'Benares.' Let me explain.

Alluding to Leo Strauss and Tertullian, I have often commented on the tension between 'Athens' (philosophy) and 'Jerusalem' (religion). It is a fruitful tension, I think, one partly responsible for the vitality of the West. The absence of a similar tension in the Islamic world helps account for its inanition. But my topic is a different tension. I now introduce 'Benares' to stand for meditation and the mystical path to the Absolute. It was in Benares, India that the Buddha became the Buddha. Or so the story goes.

If the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is that between reason and faith, what is the tension between Athens and Benares? It is the tension between disciplined thinking and disciplined nonthinking. There are of course problems of terminolgy here, as everywhere, since 'thinking' can be used in different ways. So let me limn the contrast another way: it is the tension between disciplined discursivity and disciplined nondiscursivity, between the mind operating discursively in a disciplined way and the mind operating nondiscursively but with focus or 'onepointedness.'

I arise at 2:30, and my appointed meditation hour runs from 4 to 5. Trouble is, it is very difficult to tear myself away from the scribbling and reading that occur while I get stoked up with the help of coffee for a good session on the mat. ('Session' from L. sedere, to sit.) Thus I'm caught between Athens and Benares, caught, for example, between working out an argument to show that Peter Geach is wrong to oppose the Hume-Brentano-Gilson thesis on existence, and honoring my commitment to start meditating at 4 AM.

You must think of it as a commitment, one to be honored. Just as you are committed to daily exercise for the health and longevity of fratre asino, you must be committed to daily meditation for the sake of your hegemonikon or daimon or soul or oversoul or overself or whatever you want to call it depending on your particular views. But while on the mat, forget about the particular views and their differences and how they might be rationally supported, or rationally opposed, how objections to them might be met, etc. The trick is to shut out the discursive theorizing, and the trap is to fall into doing on the black mat what you were doing earlier on the wooden chair.

The good life requires both philosophy and meditation, but to switch between them is no mean feat. It is a matter of shutting down discursive operations while retaining intense alertness and focus. Sometimes the switch occurs on its own. Running down the road, and cranking away on some technical problem, the mind works suddenly shut down and one just contemplates the unfolding scene. One just looks. Mental silence descends. One simply attends to the content of the present. To bring about the discursive shut-down by the will is difficult. But good things tend to be difficult of achievement, and relentless practice leads to results. One learns to control one's mind, to shut it off at will. That is part of what I mean by disciplined nonthinking.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. They can become as obsessed with it as body builders with muscular hypertrophy. Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty. He can chop logic, he can mentally jabber, jabber, jabber, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (G & G, 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2008/11/athens-and-bena.html