Parmenides of Elea
“With all eyes the creature sees
the open. Only our eyes are
reversed and placed wholly around creatures
as traps, around their free exit
What is outside we know from the animal’s
visage alone. ~ Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke – The Duino Elegies: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke.php
Parmenides was an important Presocratic who’s thought bears a lot of resemblance to Nagarjuna and his Diamond Slivers meditation. What follows can be a western angle on how to challenge the concept of time, subject, and object. You can review similar ideas in my review of Nirvana.
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Parmenides & Nagarjuna discussion: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7207/nagarjuna-and-parmenides-comparison
Thankfully, many lines of Parmenides’s On Nature have survived, and there’s enough for readers to ponder over. Little of his life is available, but according to tradition, he was from Elea, modern-day Velia in Italy, was a politician who passed successful laws for his native city, and he met a man named Ameinias, who “converted him to the quiet life.” He was influenced by the Pythagoreans and possibly Heraclitus and Xenophanes, but whether he was influenced directly by them or not, he nevertheless moved in his own direction, which was to explore Truth in a more holistic way than what the majority of people operate under.
Proem (Introduction)
At the beginning of the poem, Parmenides is summoned by an unknown Goddess, possibly Aletheia the Goddess of Truth. Converging from the path of the night, Parmenides meets up with the path of the day at the gates of Justice. His chariot is led by daughters of the Sun, Helios, who persuade Justice, possibly Goddess Themis, to open the gates. Here the symbolism of day and night existing at the same time foreshadows what’s to follow.
The Way of Alētheia (Reality/Truth)
Parmenides is instructed to listen well and to pass on what he has learned about the correct way of knowing. “The one – that exists, and that is impossible not to be, is the persuasive path (for it is based on truth); The other – that exists not and that cannot be, that I point out to you to be a path wholly unknowable, for you could not know what-is-not, nor could you point it out.”
This passage goes along with the understanding that you can only experience what actually happens and much of our thoughts dwell in possibilities that are more or less dim and unrealistic. In fact, a lot of psychology, meditation, and especially Heideggerian philosophy pounce on this as an avenue for therapy. Wanting to change the past or thinking that one has enough information to predict the future is a prescription for stress. Where it gets a little more complicated is that we can hold possibilities in our minds at a certain level of accuracy, but instead the Goddess emphasizes how we cannot even know or point out what-is-not because somethings are even more hidden for us. The example of day and night and how they can bleed into each other demonstrates how our concepts of day and night don’t hold complete detail. If we go around looking for certain details based on our rigid beliefs, we can easily ignore details that eventually interfere with our predictions. Even further, our human capacity for learning humbles us precisely because we don’t know what we don’t know. Currently, there are many things that could exist, and many scientific realities that we haven’t discovered yet. It’s very easy for each age to think that what they know is mostly all that we need to know. We laugh at how backward past civilizations were precisely because we don’t know how funny or contemptible we will look to our descendants. So in this case, strange things like unicorns can exist as part of a fantastic story, but what we do not know at any point in time is truly unknowable. This includes not yet invented technology, undiscovered science, and surprising turns in our life-stories.
One of the famous fragments has been translated many ways, but a common translation matches well for those who like to meditate, and it also includes all fantastical things that aren’t real but still can be thought about: “Thinking and Being are the same thing.” Essentially, we cannot think without objects to think about, and those objects trigger us to make future predictions on how those objects may turn out. Now, one can ask, why is it bad to make predictions if we need to be prepared for the unexpected?
“Necessarily, what is there to pick out and ascertain is real; for it is there to be real, whereas nothing is not.”
When we talk about unknowable things the problem is in our positive concepts that try to speak for the negative opposites. Like with Xenophanes’s comparisons, and how we learn through comparison, our positive concepts of reality bleed over into opposite experiences that are ignored, but vitally interdependent. When we speak of night or day, the dawn will have people calling it day or night at slightly different times depending on their subjective opinions. When is the day exactly turning into the night? Even if we use the word dawn when does dawn start and end? Again, people will have subjective time periods. Our concepts of reality can conceal part of reality.
Like a Buddhist description of ignorance, the Goddess admonishes: “For never shall this be forced: that things that are not, exist.”
When one believes in our abstract, or over-simplified ideas, our sense of reality can be shaken with every unpredictable event. The reality that under-girds our experiences is always partially unknowable because the edge of our concepts always gives way to an interdependence that we tend to ignore.
Milton Friedman – Pencil interdependence: https://youtu.be/R5Gppi-O3a8
“One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that it is; on this path, there are many signs: that what-is is ungenerated and imperishable; Whole, [non-diverse], steadfast, and complete; Nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is, now, all together, One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? In what way, whence, did it grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow you to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought that it is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus it must either be completely or not at all.”
Typical of meditation instructions, when one looks for permanent edges to our concepts, we always find them give way to more realistic detail, and an endless interdependence unfolds. If it was always night, it would be called something else. Day and night are labeled because of the differences we perceive, and how we use those perceptions to help us guide our decisions. Seeing the interdependence of diverse perceptions helps to zoom out of the diversity into an essential Oneness. In a relative way, all things couldn’t exist without all other things. We hit the limits of our perception and there’s a momentary relief from loneliness and separation.
“Nor is it divisible, since it all alike is…It is all full of what-is…It is un-beginning and unceasing, since coming-to-be and perishing have been driven far off, and true trust has thrust them out. Remaining the same and in the same, it lies by itself and remains thus firmly in place; for strong Necessity holds it fast in the chains of a limit, which fences it about. Wherefore it is not right for what-is to be incomplete; For it is not lacking; but if it were, it would lack everything.”
This oneness is empty and full and predicts future preoccupations on how to achieve equanimity in Pyrrohism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism. This equanimous state was called Ataraxia by the Greeks. Pyrronists tried to achieve this by reducing judgment, which matches so many other therapeutic modalities. Judgment, and even subtle discernment, involve some stress. Adjusting one’s attitude towards equanimity was called Epoché and was influential with Heidegger’s teacher Edmund Husserl.
Heidegger’s Alētheia
Martin Heidegger was very interested in the Presocratics and focused on layers of truth that may have been lost as Greek thinking changed over time and influenced the West for centuries. In his Parmenides, Heidegger studied the type of primordial thinking of the past to show us how different it was, but also to recover the incredible richness that was forgotten or Concealed as will be outlined later. “Not every thinker at the outset of Western thought is…a thinker of the beginning, a primordial thinker. The first primordial thinker was named Anaximander. The two others were Parmenides and Heraclitus.”
If you take a look back at my prior reviews of those thinkers, Anaximander was credited for bringing in the view of limited objects in an unlimited space, which was also partially supported by Pythagoras. Heraclitus’s view emphasized oneness, and Parmenides advanced on both concepts with an exploration of the ephemerality of time and the hiddenness of certain possibilities.
Translations are so important and much of what a translator brings betrays their anachronistic cultural interpretations. In the case of Heidegger, this is especially why his translations are controversial and look so different. He looked at the history of Greek thinking and translated the original Greek into what he felt Greeks actually experienced. Part of his tactic was to look at other ancient Greek writings before Plato, like Hesiod, Homer, and Pindar, and compare them to the Presocratics.
The Goddess’s advice to Parmenides is translated by Heidegger this way:
“…The appearing (in the need) remains called upon to be apparent, while it shines through everything and (hence) in that way brings everything to perfection.”
For Heidegger, the primordial ground of our experience of being human, Being with a capital B, is something to be excavated to find more and more primordial underpinnings. One of the areas most ignored in modern thinking is the problem of not knowing what we don’t know. Heidegger helps us to understand by making a comparison between what is concealed and what is un-concealed. Truth or Alētheia, for Heidegger, is the unconcealed. It’s the “persuasive truth” in the poem above, but with a lot more layers than one thinks of at first. It is also connected with the concealed, but it is progressively veiled from us all the way up to non-existence for our minds. Jungians would look at this as another version of The Shadow, where you have completely unconscious psychological skills that remain dormant with partially developed skills that are progressively conscious for us, except here we are talking more about possibilities than just skill development.
Heidegger looked at Unconcealment as a “Well-enclosing unconcealment,” because of how fitted together it is with what is concealed, or unknown at varying levels. Unconcealment happens “when an understanding of the being or essence of everything that is, shapes all the possibilities for comportment (behavior) in the world.” Heidegger likes to use the terms “essence” and “comportment” a lot, which can confuse readers. A good way to define essence is to look at common qualities that allow us to label something as a particular thing. Comportment is how we behave, habituate, and react to those essences we are aware of or are unconcealed to us.
A quick guess at unconcealment might provide images of an abrupt happening or surprise while one stands there, and it does include those events, but also the realm of time and different possibilities and ways we can react or behave. The typical way to look at what is unconcealed is that it includes what is real as well as what we are aware of. Heidegger wants the reader to take note of another level, what is concealed. “…Every endeavor to think Truth in a somewhat suitable manner, even if only from afar, is an idle affair as long as we do not venture to think the Concealed to which, presumably, Truth refers back.”
The unconcealed for Heidegger is an activity of “disclosing” and is a “non-dissembling letting appear.” So a full unconcealment allows for an understanding that isn’t misinterpreted, deceitful, or disguised. This hints at the struggle between what is veiled and what is understood. Heidegger defines concealed in many different ways. It is “conserving, preserving, holding back, entrusting, closing off, closedness, and appropriating.” You have to wrest truth from concealment like an investigator. “In the essence of truth as un-concealedness there holds sway some sort of conflict with concealedness and concealment…Unconcealedness stands in some sort of opposition to concealment.”
A great example is at the beginning of the above poem. Dawn is appearing along with the remainder of the night. There’s a period where day and night are partially co-existing and progressively unconcealing and concealing each other. How we can misinterpret this experience happens naturally as we try to communicate our concepts of experience. We can be caught in a life where we jump from one thought to another to the point where it’s very difficult to experience anything ambiguous without this conceptual overlay that forces certainty. “Word and language have become for us a conveyance and a tool for communication, one among others, to speak of ‘dealing with words’ produces at once a fatal impression. It is as if, instead of mounting a motorcycle, we would remain standing before it and make a speech about it with the intention of learning in this way how to ride it.” Another common example would be to be in school for so many years, learning endless concepts, and then to only find out later that you learn much more with actual work experiences.
This is a key to Heidegger’s goal of getting us to “think” in his way, which is looking at the experience that the concept is pointing to and to really understand the concept more robustly. We don’t want to lose those important layers of understanding because of a superficial reception of communication. “We must hear the literally taken word in such a way that we heed its directives in their pointing to the dictum. In such heeding we then hearken to what the word is trying to say. We exercise attentiveness. We begin to think.” What are instructions trying to tell us about the experiential world?
Heidegger provides an example of how something we don’t know can have such an affirmative impact on our lives, and this is because it’s like a photo negative of an event. It’s a non-event that prevents possibilities and potentials from arising in our lives. Also because we don’t choose to hold back our predictions of the future, because we habitually believe that what is unconcealed is the only thing that exists, the stress of surprise is much greater. This can happen when we know too little, are in deep forgetfulness, or if we don’t remain humble about what we may still not know. The picture negative effect is that we cannot “comport,” behave, or react to what we don’t know. We can have a sense of loss if there’s a partially veiled unconcealed notion of what we have lost, but in thorough concealment, we don’t even know what is lacking. “In forgetting not only does something slip from us, but the forgetting slips into a concealment of such a kind that we ourselves fall into concealedness precisely in our relation to the forgotten.” Modern examples would be censorship. Dictators don’t just rely on repetitive propaganda, but also censorship of competing views. How do you behave towards competing views that aren’t available for you to study?
Some of the concealments are also quite complicated and include what is considered by the Greeks as false. False can be “incorrect, dissembling, misleading, covering, veiled, fools gold, distorting, off-path, [sheltering], cache, haven, ensconced, mysterious, secret, absence, destruction, conspiracy, and not yet known.” Even further, this review is an unconcealment of the term concealment. If a person is completely unaware of Heideggerian philosophy before reading this, then they were concealed about concealment before reading.
As we learn about truth in the Greek way, Heidegger prefers Logos, over Ratio. Logos in Heidegger’s book isn’t completely certain about things. It’s an assertion we can follow through links of interdependence with other things and without too much conceptual overlay to force things: “The letting appear of the unconcealed.” Rationality is “to take something as something. Counting, calculating, calculus. Ratio is a self-adjustment to what is correct.” What makes Ratio different from Logos for Heidegger is how it can quickly turn into Certitudo or certainty. Here we can feel the stress of having a lot of certainty, which is practical for many reasons, but is already forgetting some of the understanding of concealedness. Heidegger wants to drive home the fact that no matter how much we think we know with our technical know-how, there’s always some uncertainty that our rationality ignores.
Certainty blocks out concealedness which also blocks out mystery and awe. People who are certain about everything are quite bored because nothing surprising is expected to happen, and when it eventually does, even if it’s small, it’s traumatic. Eg. Heated arguments in the workplace, in intimate relationships, or in political debates. It really helps to hold back certainty, or “position-taking,” until there’s more investigation. Eventually, if we investigate enough so that we can make a good decision, then we have something more solid to rest our certainty. Certainty involves judgment, and judgment always harbors a certain amount of stress. Removing needless stress is therapeutic. Heidegger said, “the inception of the metaphysics of the modern age rests on the transformation of the essence of veritas into certitudo. The question of truth becomes the question of the secure, assured, and self-assuring use of ratio. Attaining, with certainty, what is right. (Justice).” Wanting to be right and resting security on one’s certainty can easily turn into insecurity when the rationale is proven false. “In this epoch, as a consequence of a peculiarly concealed incertitude, certitude in the sense of unconditional certainty counts as what is most valuable, and therefore ascertaining becomes the basic character of all [behavior]. Ascertaining is not a merely subsequent corroboration but is rather the aggressive making secure in advance for the sake of certitude.”
How thought moved from the Greeks to the modern age was summarized by Heidegger as a Christian attitude of wanting to behave justly, to Kant, where people fervently want to be right in the end. With Nietzsche, Heidegger predicts a desert in his form of Truth. In Nietzsche’s notes, Heidegger found this quote: “What is just = the will, to perpetuate an actual power relation…” This can easily be seen in arguments and fights over leadership. The will to power is to be in a power position where one can command. That intense certainty is often intense because there’s a strong need to find a power position to feel secure, or to avoid feelings of helplessness. In the 20th century, and even in the 21st, this problematic form of truth influences the public towards a terrible narcissism that lays waste to mystery, awe, and appreciation. For Heidegger, we are starting with Nietzsche first and excavating backwards to try and regain a deeper sense of truth from the ancient Greeks. “The field of the essence of Alētheia (Truth) is covered over with debris.”
The typical modern way is to quickly solve mysteries so we can earn money to consume and continually believe that all mysteries are solved for the time being, except for those mysteries that can provide more consumption if we solve them as well. The “desert” in where we lose the sense of awe and appreciation is that we ignore how concealedness will always be with us, unless we are a God and know everything. It ignores our death with escapism and ignores the value of our life when we lack the power to consume as much as others. Consumption is important, but it can easily turn into repetitive consuming leading to extreme boredom and further concealing that it’s a wonder that we are alive at all. It takes training to look at what exists without thinking of its utility, or how we can consume it. “The openness of the open mystery does not consist in solving the mystery, thus destroying it, but consists in not touching the concealedness of the simple and essential and letting this concealedness alone in its [non-appearance.]”
Heidegger wants his “thinking,” a kind of meditation, to replace these historically more concealed forms of certitude and wills to power. “We are here only broaching a realm who’s fullness of essence we hardly surmise and certainly do not fathom, for we are outside the mode of experience proper to it.”
Like in Buddhism, Heidegger sees that we get alienated by our sense of subject and object. There’s a special stress there with our need to control objects for our security, even if in the end we are mortal. He wants to reintroduce to us what was already there. “Man is the being that emerges from itself, emerges in such a way that in this emerging, and for it, it has the word. In the word, the being we can call man comports itself to beings as a whole, in the midst of which man himself is.” We are part of the universe, and the sense of separation is an illusion. “The ‘living being’ is [nature, reality,] a being whose Being is determined by [nature], by emergence and self-opening.”
When we are going through a “sojourn” through this life we have to realize that our being is being affected by what we don’t know, but still exists. Our interconnectedness can’t be made into a label or an experience. We have to intuit it to realize that at all times we can’t always be so certain in our belief in perfectly delineated chunks of reality. “Disclosedness and concealment are a basic feature of Being…The forgotten is, in the experience of the Greeks, what has sunk away into concealedness, specifically in such a fashion that the sinking away i.e. the concealing, remains concealed to the very one who has forgotten…The forgetter is concealed to himself in his relation to…the forgotten. [Oblivion].” Part of this concealing could be explained in an example by looking at all the ancient books that only remain to us as a reference in others because they have been lost through time. For example, the books destroyed in the library of Alexandria. What knowledge, reactions, behaviors, or comportments have been missing for generations because that knowledge was destroyed forever?
How we can cope with this problem of not knowing our potential, is an acceptance of both the unconcealed and the concealed in our lives. This coping involves us allowing a sense of awe with discovery. Awe for Heidegger connected with Truth and Virtue in the mentality of the Presocratic Greeks. “Awe as the essence of Being conveys to man the disclosure of beings. But opposed to awe there holds sway the concealment we call oblivion.” Awe is connected with appreciation and we tend to be more virtuous when we are in a state of awe. One of those simple virtues is just a preservation of what happens, and that comes through our ability of language to signal what we witnessed. That signal has an urgency that is already in the sound before we complete an assertion. Ahhhh! “The proper essence of the word is that it lets beings appear in the Being and preserves what appears, i.e., the unconcealed, as such. Being manifests itself primordially in the word.”
Heidegger tries very well to bridge the gap between our concepts of “things, facts, matters, and issues,” with his understanding of the The Word. Speaking for us isn’t just annunciation. We also use our hands to communicate. The bridging of communication and experience traditionally came through the hand, and even with The Word, the hand is involved in writing. What is lost with modern technology is the ability to attach our individual stamp when we use keyboards instead of handwriting. Our personal character is blunted a little. Action for Heidegger is that human intention that can involve handing things. “Things ‘act,’ insofar as the things present and at hand dwell within the reach of the ‘hand.’ The hand reaches out for them and reaches them: action, the reaching arrival at something, is essentially related to the hand.”
Darkness can happen when the intention of the hand is separated from the word in our modern mechanical experience. We can become mechanized and alienated from our humanness in an unexpected way. “Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides this ‘advantage,’ that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same.” We can lose that sense of awe with our individual contribution to reality. It’s just a boring means to an end. “Insofar as the veiling clouds bring gloom, the way providing the view lacks that clarity which would lead it straight away toward the unconcealed. Therefore the cloud, within action, leads the way astray, leads outside of what the thinking ahead, the reflecting, and the commemorating provide when they are guided by awe. Transposed into concealment, as such a darkening, man stands in a certain way outside of what is unconcealed.” Our communicating loses character, personality and maybe even some sympathy. If you look back at an old diary, you can easily feel a sense of care towards a past self. If those same words were put into a typeface, it could easily appear our history has been depersonalized, or obliviated, even if we can’t say exactly how. By making ourselves look the same as others, and not just in typeface, we can limit our individual possibilities. “The cloud is signless; that means it does not show itself at all…All darkening leaves behind a brightness. In the fact that the cloud of forgetting concealment conceals itself as such, the uncanny character of forgetting comes to the fore. Forgetting itself occurs already in an oblivion. If we forget something, we are no longer with it, but instead we are ‘away,’ ‘drawn aside.'”
More deeply than using typeface instead of a pen are the limitations we get with deeper concealment which not only clears away possibilities in the present, but also how what is concealed in the present can narrow future paths. When we think of our future goals, they often look like wild fantasies precisely because of what we are currently unaware of. We may project fantastical elements into our wishes with no preparation for limitations we can’t foresee. It’s rare to have the energy to always make a Plan B. A healthier way with goals is to look at spheres of possibilities as opposed to narrow all-or-nothing options. “What shows itself, the unconcealed, the indicator, can subsequently also mean ‘goal.’ But the essence of the ‘goal’ for the Greeks is the limitation and demarcation of the direction and range of [behavior]. Thought in the modern way, a ‘goal’ is only the provision of an ‘intermediate’ stage within the limitlessness of the ever increasing successes and concerns.” The modern way freezes goals and creates a lot of attachment and pain when those goals are thwarted by what eventually becomes unconcealed. In a way, those rigid goals often ignore timelines which can signal to us that we need to change our goals to something else. “Concealment here does not only touch what is past but also what is present and, above all, what, in thinking ahead, is approaching man and what befits his [bearing] by providing an assigned direction.” What we don’t know can eventually provide an assigned direction when unconcealed, and send us into unexpected life paths, including the unpleasant ones we don’t want, but fortunately, we can also wander into pleasant paths. Our individual stamp as we walk along our own path maintains a zest and character when we stay more present and humble with what we don’t know and we react with a sense of awe with changes and surprises instead of entitlement to a pre-prescribed life story. Perfectionist life stories imitated from culture are particularly prone to creating stress and panic when a person holds to their ideal goals and is too inflexible to allow natural twists and turns to change them.
The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken
For Heidegger, the ultimate alienation in modern culture is a mechanized communism where personality is effaced and life is completely planned. He quotes Lenin: “‘Bolshevism is Soviet power plus electrification.’ That means: Bolshevism is the organized, calculating conclusion of the unconditional power of the party along with complete technization.” Individual appreciation is moved into a concealed oblivion which deadens the sense of self that cries out for recognition and emotional attunement from others. Achievement is labeled as “exploitation” and then punished to bring people back into conformity. The only way out is rebellion.
Stalin votes in Russian election: https://youtu.be/qfEsvAfme_Y
English tutor Nick P quotes (2018): Stalin: https://youtu.be/k5qAUB6AkoY
30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall: https://youtu.be/-cwfomUrOLU
“The essence of veiling consists in this, that it relegates things and people and both in their relation to one another to the abode of concealment…Above all, oblivion tears things and man away from unconcealedness, in such a manner that the one who forgets dwells within a realm in which beings are withdrawn and man himself is withdrawn from beings; and even this reciprocal withdrawal, as a relation, is withdrawn from unconcealedness.” So we lose opportunities and our emotional relatedness with those opportunities, and in deep concealment in that we don’t know what we’re missing. A massive repression. This didn’t start with Marxism for Heidegger. It was already at the beginning with Plato, and they even had a name for it, Techne: “…a sign that procedural processes are lording it over experience.” Another stress from techne is how workers often fight exactly on those grounds of certitude when so many cogs in the machine aren’t communicating and working well together. The unexpected creates a lot of stress in work environments. This is especially so with social engineering when unexpected consequences blow up in the faces of the elite Philosopher Kings.
Dave Portnoy – Politicians are stealing the right to earn a living: https://youtu.be/DxEtwJaLPnc
So as we move on our path in life, Heidegger wants us to relax the tension of thinking with certainty by looking at consciousness, which he names many different things, and to primordially peel back layers of extraneous concept. “The pole lets beings appear in their Being and show the totality of their condition. The pole does not produce and does not create beings in their Being, but as pole it is the abode of the unconcealedness of beings as a whole.” We “emerge, [and] rise up into the unconcealed.” As we deal with what we do know we can now detect the friction between what we are experiencing and what we don’t know, as we bump into obstacles for further unconcealment in our environment. “Every unconcealment of beings stands in conflict with concealment and accordingly also with dissemblance and distortion.” In this conflict, we settle into what IS, which Heidegger calls The Uncanny.
“It is what comes into presence always already and in advance prior to all ‘uncanninesses.’ The uncanny, as the Being that shines into everything ordinary, i.e., into beings, and that in its shining often grazes beings like the shadow of a cloud silently passing. The uncanny is the simple, the insignificant, ungraspable by fangs of the will, withdrawing itself from all artifices of calculation, because it surpasses all planning. The emergence and the concealment that dwell in all emergent beings, i.e., Being itself, must therefore be astonishing to common experience within the everyday dealing with beings…The astounding is for the Greeks the simple, the insignificant, Being itself. The astounding, visible in the astonishing, is the uncanny, and it pertains so immediately to the ordinary that it can never be explained on the basis of the ordinary.” Our Being is like a light that shines on only a part of the absolute reality of everything, and also what we accurately remember or can accurately predict. What is outside of that sphere of existence is more or less concealed.
What Heidegger is pointing at is when we are in our presence and we negate that presence by jumping into the conceptual subject-object duality we move through unconcealedness in a limited way and forget a greater self that is aware that there is always some concealment. For those who like Advaita Vedanta meditations, the Great “I” is what he is targeting. It’s what appears before we get lost in our narrative concerns or our representations of ourselves. It’s our consciousness of what IS, and what is concealed from it. The reason why this is so important is the stress related to the regular attention we provide to a subject-object being. We feel stressfully alienated from a particular field that will be described below: The Open. But in the meantime, what Heidegger is saying is that for the ancient Greeks, overthinking and forcing a sense of self onto the field of awareness was not as much a compulsion back then as it is for modern people today. A common discipline that meditators like Eckhart Tolle recommend is to try to think when you need to think and to not think when you don’t need to. For modern people, this is a gigantic challenge: to dwell regularly in the primordial Being. “For the Greeks, disclosure and emergence prevail in the essence of every originarily emergent being. Insofar as Being comes into presence out of Truth, there belongs to it self-disclosing emergence…All post Greek humanity, have for a long time been so deflected that we understand looking exclusively as man’s representational [subject] self-direction toward beings [object]. But in this way looking does not all come into sight; instead it is understood only as a self-accomplished ‘activity,’ i.e, an act of re-presenting. To re-present means here to present before oneself, to bring before oneself, and to master, to attack things. The Greek’s experience looking at first and properly as the way man emerges and comes into presence, with other beings, but as man in his essence. Thinking as moderns and therefore insufficiently, but for us surely more understandably, we can say in short: the look, is not looking as activity and act of the ‘subject’ but is sight as the emerging of the ‘object’ and its coming to our encounter. Looking is self-showing and indeed that self-showing in which the essence of the encountering person ’emerges’ in the double sense that his essence opens itself to the look – opens itself at any rate in order to let come into presence in the unconcealed at the same time the concealment and the abyss of his essence. [Loss of ownership of subject.]”
How do we break the habit of excessive thinking? – Eckhart Tolle: https://youtu.be/dTFDfR47dl4
A more simple way to look at it for experienced meditators is that consciousness can only exist if there are objects to be conscious of, so Heidegger wants us to see this kind of “self-showing” before we get lost in the conceptual “me” and “my concerns.” The “me” and “my concerns” conceal bare consciousness. This consciousness can’t really be labeled, but Heidegger tries to. “Luminous self-disclosure shows itself as the shining. What shines is what shows itself to a looking. What appears to the looking is the sight that solicits man and addresses him, the look.” Essentially The Look IS. What is looked at IS. The Look proves our existence. Awareness, aware of itself.
Collapsing the Separation Between Awareness and the Objects of Experience – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/gK0arUFvU8c
Awareness is Self Aware – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/h0ZoNA9y4QA
The Nature of Awareness – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/R-IIzAblVlg
Why this is so important to Heidegger comes more from the actual experience of meditation. You can use many different kinds of meditation, but what is often missing from most types is a healing attunement and resonance between The Look and the narrative self. When one is always jumping from one thought-concern to another, the natural stress creates a sense of trauma and separation that can become habitual and essentially a permanent fixture of life experience, where The Look is covered over. What is healing here is a kind of earlier version of what Eugene Gendlin called “Focusing.” Instead of looking for a therapist, or a parental figure to soothe oneself, one can see that a lot of the pain we have is our unrealistic narratives that keep finding the surprises coming out of the concealed and emerging into the unconcealed in haphazard ways. It shocks our life stories and what we hope for them, because they are so unrealistic. Stepping back from the narratives of successive subject-object conflicts, creates an emotional distance that is healing. The judgments and stresses decrease. We don’t have to get caught in how things SHOULD be, because if we rest in Being we can assess how realistic our thoughts are towards beings. How Gendlin instructs students to practice Focusing is to go into the body, which gets us much closer to bare consciousness, and ask questions to bring out feelings and to resonate with them. We are creating what Heidegger calls a “life sympathy.”
Briefly, Eugene would instruct us to ask questions and ask “how is my life going? What is the main thing for me right now?” We are to wait for a physical response instead of getting lost in narratives. It’s more important to let the complete feeling of all the problems show up as a cluster of feelings and then to apply accurate labels or images to the feelings. “This is what makes it feel like that.” Resonating happens when there’s a back and forth between different images and feelings that gradually become more accurate. The higher awareness is able to listen to the feelings and resonate with them. It can elevate being, which gets lost in concerns, towards Being. You feel more interconnected and it becomes easier to maintain presence the way that Heidegger wants us to, to Think in his particular way as opposed to over-conceptualizing. He even has the common complaint that Buddhist teachers have with people who have conceptualized their practice too much. “Philosophy, as the heedfulness to the claim of Being on man, is first of all the care for Being and never a matter of ‘cultural formation’ and knowledge. Therefore it is possible that many persons may possess a great amount of learned information about philosophical opinions without ever being ‘philosophical’ and without ‘philosophizing.’ Then again, others may be touched by the claim of Being without knowing what it is and without responding to the claim of Being with appropriate thinking.”
When we continuously practice Thinking, we can gradually unconceal objects and experiences while at the same time realize that we are only unconcealing certain angles and preserving those points of view. “…A being only is insofar as at the same time and in opposition to this concealment and in this withdrawal there also prevails an unconcealedness in which the unconcealed is conserved…All dwell to a certain degree within the essential region of concealment…The Greek thinkers speak of ‘to save what appears’; that means to conserve and to preserve in unconcealedness what shows itself – that is, against the withdrawal into concealment and distortion. He who in this fashion saves (conserves and preserves) the appearing, saves it into the unconcealed, is himself saved for the unconcealed and conserved for it.” In a way, ignorance is the concealment around us, and as our light of unveiling illuminates the darkness of concealment we can save our possibilities that are preserved in what we unconcealed. We can preserve beings and our ability to behave or react in different ways to them, which is preserving our sense of possibilities, and a form of learning.
This points to Heidegger’s focus on the edge between the concealed and the unconcealed and how utterly instant and interdependent both are. As we move away from experiences, objects, and possibilities, there is a fading, and in many other cases, an instantaneous disappearing. If possibilities are permanently shut off, then the concealment is also permanent. As we explore more, there is a brightening, we learn new skills, and possibilities open for us. Concealment is a “withdrawal of what appears in its appearing…” Unconcealment on the other hand, “is directed to the region of withdrawing concealment. This is the one and only thing necessary, since Truth, which is what is to be experienced, is itself by essence founded on forgetting. Between these nothing mediates and there is no transition, because both in themselves pertain immediately to each other by their very essence. Whenever a belonging together is an essential one, the transition from one side to the other is ‘sudden.'”
I emphasized above the understanding that experience is founded on forgetting because it will pertain to Heidegger’s description of The Open, which is a constant reminder of our interdependence with the universe. But even with these insights, a slowing down to notice appearing and disappearing helps to develop a skill that benefits from this kind of meditation: Poetizing. “…The essential beginning of poetry, i.e. the primordial free salvation and preservation of Being, without which poetizing would even lack what it is to be poetized.” This paying attention helps with a sense of wonder, but also putting words to those primordial experiences can help to preserve them for the future in the primordial way, like in Haiku poetry. “We must think dis-closure exactly the way we think of discharging (igniting) or dis-playing (unfolding). Discharging means to release the charge; displaying means to let play out the folds of the manifold in their multiplicity…Dis-closure is equally for the sake of an en-closure as a sheltering of the unconcealed in the unconcealedness of presence, i.e., Being.” As people meditate and poetize they see that the bleeding of interconnectedness is something being shined on by consciousness, but in actuality, it was always there. The beginning. Except this beginning never ends and it’s a constant discovery, even a violent discovery, of interconnectedness that was always there. “Truth is against concealing closure, and through this ‘against’ it is for sheltering enclosure. Truth is against concealing because it comes to presence in the unconcealed for the sake of a sheltering…[It marks] the conflict out of which Truth is unified in its essence, and out of which it begins.”
Zen Haiku: https://rumble.com/v1gpga3-zen-haiku.html
As time passes, Heidegger departs from Parmenides, and Nagarjuna for that matter, by not emphasizing the emptiness of time, because time can’t be caught, frozen or examined. Instead of eliminating calculation of time, he reduces it. There is still a calculation but it too primordial to be considered a scientific calculation. “Time is something that in its way bears things, releasing them and taking them back…Number has no power in relation to it. That which dispenses to all beings their time of appearance and disappearance withdraws essentially from all calculation.” Time as a strict calculation is where all the rushing and deadlines create all the stress. “Modern man therefore always ‘has’ less and less time, because he has taken possession of time in advance only as calculable and has made time something of which he is obsessed, though he is presumably the ruler whose rule masters time. For primordial Greek thinking, on the contrary, time, always as dispensing and dispensed time, takes man and all beings essentially into its ordering and in every case orders the appearance and disappearance of beings. Time discloses and conceals. Thus time can hide back into itself, only what has appeared…Beings, coming into presence and becoming concealed in absence by the ‘sweep’ of time, are understood here in terms of appearance…Something must therefore be present letting the appearance emerge (coming forth, out of concealedness).” For Heidegger, time is more based on events rather than units of time. For example, sayings like: “‘time will bring it out into the light of day; everything needs its time.'”
Now that we’ve reached the edge of withdrawing concealedness, the sense of interdependence increases. What is more primordial allows our narrow perceptions and thoughts but is interdependent with many other things that are concealed, as Heraclitus intimated. Our existence touches other existences and they also do to others infinitely. “The free is the guarantee, the sheltering place, for the Being of beings. The open, as the free, shelters and salvages Being. The open and its extension into the vastness of the unlimited and limitless are zones without stopping places, where every sojourn loses itself in instability. The open provides no shelter or security. The open is rather the place where what is still undetermined and unresolved plays out, and therefore it is an occasion for erring and going astray.” There are so many interconnections with nature that stretch beyond our comprehension, basically the entire universe, but we can’t deny their pertinence in our lives when they begin to influence us. The Open includes both what is concealed and unconcealed. “In speaking of unconcealedness (Truth), Nature (emergence into the unconcealed), (appearing and letting appear), (concealing), and (being-hidden), what is always named is that which stands out into the open and therefore is the open.” Now this open is not just a non-emotional equanimity at all times. Being includes our relationship to beings, and we can resonate with those feelings in real-time. Rüdiger Safranski in Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, says that “Heidegger immerses himself in ‘experiencing’ in order to discover our ‘Being in situations,’ and…he knows very well that in our scientific theorizing and in the large canvases of ideologies, we invariably miss it…We must be able to wait for high-tension intensities of a meaningful life.” The difference here is that we are “thinking” in the Heideggerian way by letting “beings be in the open what they are as beings.” We are allowing more possibility for beings, and also allowing for concealments. We rest in the groundless instead of resting in a wobbly certitude. Like a Yin and Yang, The Open includes also what is unconcealed as a kind of light. The light of consciousness. “The lighted and the lighting, and this in turn the shining of the light that provides brightness…The light is the determining radiance, the shining and appearing.” What is different from this automatic shining and appearing is our regular thinking which is more goal oriented and ravenous.
The Presocratics: Heraclitus: https://rumble.com/v1gst93-the-presocratics-heraclitus.html
In Early Greek Thinking, Heidegger translates “Thinking and being are the same thing,” as “thinking and thought ‘it is’ are the same.” The interesting twist here is what the overall Being can see of being related to thinking. Here we label a static noun, Thought, out of a verb or activity, Thinking. Delving further into past philosophy, Heidegger finds even more angles to flesh out of our typical sense of being that gets overlooked. He attributes where he got his idea of our typical mode of re-presenting. Famously it was explained by Descartes as “I think, therefore I am.” With Leibniz he saw “percipere is like an appetite which seeks out the particular being and attacks it, in order to grasp it and wholly subsume it under a concept relating this being’s presence back to the percipere (repraesentare). Repraesentatio, representation, is defined as the perceptive self-presentation (to the self as ego) of what appears.” The Latin percipere, sounds a lot like a passive perception in modern English, but it’s anything but. If one meditates, one can catch this process of self-representation in our daily goals and acquirements. An example would be looking at something you want in a shop window and getting a flash of a self-representation enjoying the product bundled with anticipation and urgency to buy. After we consume the product, it’s now labeled and shelved in memory to be available for future reference. An image of self is represented as if in front of oneself to be viewed and assessed. This is like an ambition to create a lifestyle so that the self can measure itself as progressing in one way or another. Self-narratives build so quickly! In a way, we are also consuming ourselves as we measure how we are doing in our life story and consume the pleasure of the narrative. If you are feeling pleasure, there is consumption. This includes times when we look back at our great successes and positive events with pleasure as we look at diaries or old photos. The problem for Heidegger is that this making the lower being into an object to imagine, label, and measure, leads eventually to a subject-object alienation found in most conceptions of the self in the West. We label-ize ourselves and put the overall Being into concealment. It creates that stressful sense of separation again, and because there are varying amounts of pleasure, the conditioning makes us repeat this cycle, again and again, making it hard for modern people to relax the stress of striving to endlessly increase consumption, and also the tendency of the mind to want to create ever-better self-narratives. What brings people to meditation, or other forms of psychology, is when the consuming goes into addictions and or conflicts because of a Will-to-power to dominate territory against others. This is why it’s important to notice feelings along with thoughts.
The activity of thinking is full of moods and that’s what becomes unconscious for us when we are thinking quickly or being deeply engrossed in thinking. Like in Psychoanalysis, there are many wishes, goals, and intentions that go by unnoticed. Heidegger wants to make a global label for the type of intention in thinking. The general emotion that Heidegger points to is the mood of Care. It includes both the bare awareness and the concern over objects. It happens quickly without much effort. “The look of Being, which looks into beings, is the Greek “View.” The grasping look in the sense of seeing is in Greek “To-watch-with-care.” As one develops the sense of Care, there is a connection to the Greeks of Awe and Virtue, which is a desire to be prepared, but also open to what emerges. The Open is “an unclosed and unoccupied extension prepared for the reception and distribution of objects.” The danger here of course is making The Open into a conceptual container. We have to remain in the experience which is interdependent infinitely. “We will never arrive at the open, as the essence of truth, simply by stretching the open in the sense of the ‘extended’ or in the sense of the free as commonly understood, stretching it into a gigantic container encompassing everything…To think Being is very simple, but that the simple is for us the most arduous…All that is needed is simple wakefulness in the proximity of any random unobtrusive being, an awakening that all of a sudden sees that the being ‘is’…It is as the groundless that the free comes to light, and that is how we name it, provided we think nothing more of a being than its ‘it is.'”
How we can return to feeling separate and a sense of lack is falling into endless concern over individual objects within the open and losing the perception of their actual interdependence. “…Only unconcealed beings can appear and do appear in the open of Being. Man adheres, at first unwittingly and then constantly, to these beings. He forgets Being and in such forgetting learns nothing more than the overlooking of Being and alienation from the open…Being, the never [independent], is the groundless. This seems to be a lack, though only if calculated in terms of beings, and it appears as an abyss in which we founder without support in our relentless pursuit of beings. In fact we surely fall into the abyss, we find no ground, as long as we know and seek a ground only in the form of a being and hence never carry out the leap into Being or leave the familiar landscape of the oblivion of Being. This leap requires no digressions or formalities. For everywhere and always and in the closest proximity to the most inconspicuous beings there already dwells the openness of the possibility of explicitly thinking the ‘it is’ of beings as the free, in the clearing of which every being is liberated as if to it’s freedom, is Being itself. Everything unconcealed is as such secured in the Open of Being, i.e., in the groundless.”
Now, this freedom has to be couched in the same manner as Buddhism. Because we have to calculate in order to work and take care of ourselves, we will always have some, narrowing, focusing, mental processing, and stress somewhere. The value of these practices is the gaps between mental processing where we can reconnect with the Higher Being of awareness. We can save energy and apply it to our priorities. We also need to develop skills to continue unconcealing truth, and that always requires some strain of mental processing. There is also energizing and enjoyable mental processing activities in the form of Poetizing, which helps to preserve respect for primordial experience. Heidegger pits poetizing of our experiences of the open against modern mechanization and dehumanization of man to a mere animal made up of parts. “The metaphysics lying at the foundation of the biologism of the nineteenth century and of psychoanalysis, namely the metaphysics of the complete oblivion of Being, is the source of an ignorance of all laws of Being, the ultimate consequence of which is an uncanny [animalizing] of man.”
In the end, the Goddess for Heidegger is Aletheia, Truth. “Aletheia is the disclosedness that in itself shelters all emergence and all appearance and disappearance…It is the essence of all essence. Essentiality.” In the simple resting in what IS, a wonder can sneak up on a meditator. Safranski describes this as “the wonderment at the ‘naked’ That. That anything exists there at all. The relation between direct experience and its objectification had been characterized by Heidegger as a process of de-experiencing – the unity of the situation is dissolved, and experiencing turns into the self-perception of a subject confronted with objects. One has dropped out of direct Being and now finds oneself as someone who has ‘objects,’ including oneself as an object, called the subject. These objects, as well as the subject, can then be examined for their further characteristics, connections, causations, and so on; they are analytically determined and eventually appraised. In the secondary process the neutralized ‘objects’ are once more built into a world-connection, or, as Heidegger puts it, a dress is put on them so they do not have to stand about naked…This astonishing Something that Heidegger has in mind and that he calls before-worldly is the realization of the miracle that something exists there at all…An astonishment as if one had just been born into this world.”
John Smith and “King Lear” – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/xywCcndsxQQ
Why is there anything at all? – Victor Stenger – Closer to Truth: https://youtu.be/FJY-irMl_50
Why is there anything at all? – Bede Rundle – Closer to Truth: https://youtu.be/bkjJduwa608
Why is there anything at all? – David Albert – Closer to Truth: https://youtu.be/0D7Pbh-6k7o
One is left with an endlessly looping question of Why, which can never be answered, except with more presence with what IS. Another method I like to use to create that Uncanny sense of IS, is to ask “why does anything have to have the particular shape, look, and feel that it does? Would a different planet with life on it look radically different?” Answers invariably involve scientific laws, but why can’t those laws be different? The ultimate answer is that “it just is.” You can also ask “isn’t it amazing that our technology allows us to do this?” Repeated practice points to letting go of discursive thinking that jumps around and leads back to a presencing of what is present. It’s a recovery of the wonder that a child has but with the benefit of adult experience that one can return to at any time. Analytical thinking has the necessary importance of helping us find out how to survive, but watching stressful thoughts like “this is too hard! Why does it have to be this way?” can lead to areas of relief when they aren’t allowed to play out, because it’s ultimately self-inflicted. The IS-ness answers all those questions that make us feel stuck. Because it IS, therefore it can be. All our stressful thoughts that can’t except that must retreat to some form of fantasy. The hint here is that there is still quite a bit of thinking within sensation, and one can practice trying to do activities with as little self-representing as possible. Imagine that!
The Miracle of Experience – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/_oWHbsHO2-0
By looking at anything your ego didn’t create, those things can be viewed as a gift, and The Open, which includes your entire being, and your being can be viewed as a gift as well because your ego didn’t create it, doesn’t need certainty with the answer to the question why I exist or why anything exists. The therapeutic answer is just: Gift-ness. The feeling of being gifted allows one to explore different comportments, or behaviors so that you can play in your gifted life and develop beyond rigid, conditioned, self-narratives you exercised in the past with all your repeated re-presenting. This re-presenting includes a conceptual self based on measuring how well it’s doing at survival. It’s the basis of our glee or depression depending on our stories of success or failure. A finite limited self-concept is naturally terrified of annihilation and contorts the body with tension. Like in my past reviews on Psychoanalytic views of how a conceptual self can expand in territory beyond the body and get into conflicts with others and oneself, it’s the exploration inwards to find a concrete self that dissolves the expansion and the tension. Rupert Spira aptly says that when “we look for this entity, we don’t find it. When we look for the ‘I’, we find the I of Awareness, not the ‘I’ of the separate entity…There’s only one thing the tiger cannot stand, and that is to be looked at.” Part of the problem of survival is the inevitable conflicts over scarcity that make people feel estranged from The Open. Scanning for a concrete version of the conceptual ‘I’ leads to an unexpected relief in unfindability. I find the relief isn’t described very well by many meditation instructors. They say it’s love with a big ‘L.’ I would say that missing definition of that type of relief is Belonging.
As you walk on your path, there may be boulders that you have to dodge or debris blocking your way, but that sense of preparedness for what comes out of the unconcealed, a sense of belonging with The Open as well, and playfulness to be creative, makes for a life that feels fresh. You sometimes have to share the trail with others when they appear out of concealedness, but the preparedness that is undergirded by an awareness of interdependence, can step out of alienation and self-accept with a healthy self-value because you belong with The Open. You’re not estranged. You can feel the mind click when alienation turns into belonging. Obstacles are what IS and the only solution is to improvise and cope, instead of staying imprisoned in narrow self-possibilities that are untested and that you stew over in your mind. This self-respect can spread to the environment and project respect there as well because of this belonging. Even heavy processing in thinking, that people often avoid with meditation, is benefited in that one realizes that energy can be saved in rest and expended when appropriate, and there’s no need to eliminate all stress. Not all thinking is intense high processing. Thinking shouldn’t be feared and it also belongs. Seeing the varying levels of alienation and pain in thoughts should be enough to discern which thinking is needed and when it can be replaced with stillness, or healthier improvisational thinking. Improvisational thinking has the healthy feeling of opportunity as opposed to an imprisoned fate. It’s also a form of healthy self-esteem because it’s based on concrete reality and doesn’t require inflation, self-deprecation, or an authority figure to balance itself out. Doing good or bad depends on actions, and future actions don’t have to be fated. As long as there are real opportunities, then self-esteem can be developed in reality and realistically. The ups and downs then come from realistic situations and aren’t intensified by distorted thinking. The emotions make sense and reflect reality. There’s a release valve of tension when errors and mistakes are used for learning instead of being looped in endless distorted self-criticism and excessive shame.
Rupert Spira – “The eye of awareness”: https://youtu.be/Q8udmHvoLII
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://rumble.com/v1gvdo1-the-ego-and-the-id-sigmund-freud.html
Narcissistic Supply – Freud and Beyond: https://rumble.com/v1gveop-narcissistic-supply-freud-and-beyond-wnaad.html
Mindfulness – How to avoid intellectualizing your practice [Anatta]: https://rumble.com/v1gr0w5-mindfulness-how-to-avoid-intellectualizing-your-practice.-anatta.html
Integration After the Recognition of Our True Nature – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/MIpvGcosHuk
Brain Dysregulation: How To Know If it’s Happening (and What To Do About It) – Crappy Childhood Fairy: https://youtu.be/8LNxy035NsU
The danger of The Open also has an added benefit in that one doesn’t have to be a solipsist and believe everything is in the mind, like many meditators can get caught in. The outdoor world can bring events tumbling into unconcealment. This way of thinking can smoothly integrate with The Open without the fear of total alienation. We have to except the limits of our senses and it’s healthy to believe there’s a reality that can affect us eventually, when situations ricochet out from the concealed into our sphere of shining. For example, one can be in a blissful meditation retreat, and then come home to a house that has been invaded. There’s a mess left by thieves rifling through your belongings. You were blissful while this was happening and the mood only changed when you finally unconcealed information about the crime. The alienation is only a problem when one is almost completely preoccupied with rumination and thoughts about controlling what can’t be controlled, leaving us stuck in the stressful lower being. This is being stuck in the particular and in the entitlement of our limited beliefs. It’s that problem of Aletheia again, where we posit truths and expectations onto realities that conceal important information. We then have trouble processing and accepting the news. Our meditative love and equipoise is gone.
Nothing Gold – Joakim (Todd Terje Remix): https://youtu.be/xU1QpbHz6ak
This problem prompted Heidegger to ask, “…does self-concealment reign at the heart of disclosure?” Another way of asking it is, do our explorations require that we narrow from Being? His answer is that we need to see the big Being in all beings as a resting place for thinking. The exercise of thinking is simply a muscle that gets tired and needs rest in Being. There’s also a thinking that is a form of rest when we connect the dots of cause and effect. Some of the dangerous causes and effects help us to understand in ways that can lead to future progress. Through learning and mastery, or progressive unconcealment, what is frightening can lead to a stable understanding. It’s a type of thinking that can aid our survival, fight back when necessary, but also through investigating the particular, it can pull us back to interdependence. In The Orange Book, Shantanand Saraswati describes this form of thinking. “The sugar cube comes from sugar; sugar comes from sugar cane; sugar cane comes from soil, water, air, light, etc. Carrying on the argument ‘this comes from that, that comes from that. . .’, we ultimately trace the origin of the sugar cube to [Unmanifest Nature].” This connects the narrowing of our attention when we explore the particular back to a widening and supports the belief in seeing consciousness everywhere, but also to see that our exhausted researches always give up at certain unknowns, or concealments. It’s humbling, but it unites the concrete with the abstract. The abstract is our current understanding of the whole that is subject to change with further unconcealment. “Thus to get to the abstract we take the help of the concrete…” This is also another pointer to a healthier self-esteem when we can scan cause and effect with our own body and mind. “I came from here. I was influenced this way or that way. I learned from this or that. I can’t live without food or oxygen just like a tree requires light, water, soil, and CO2. The tree belongs and so do I.”
Awareness Veils Itself with Its Own Activity – Rupert Spira: https://youtu.be/9Ba96sAY61A
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Parmenides of Elea – David Gallop: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780802069085/
Parmenides – Martin Heidegger: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780253212146/
Heidegger and Unconcealment – Mark Wrathall: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780521739122/
Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil – Rüdiger Safranski: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780674387102/
Early Greek Thinking – Martin Heidegger: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780060638429/
The Presocratic Philosophers – G.S. Kirk: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780521274555/
A Presocratic Reader – Richard McKirahan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781603843058/
Focusing – Eugene Gendlin: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780553278330/
The Poetry of Rilke: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780374532710/
The Orange Book – Dr. Francis Roles, Shantanand Saraswati: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3a3zemb
Nirvana: https://rumble.com/v1grcgx-mindfulness-nirvana.html
Philosophy: https://psychreviews.org/category/philosophy03/