[Image: “Parked Car, Small Town Main Street” (1932), by Walker Evans. Found this here, at the Web site of the Portland Museum of Art.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
The Seeker’s List of Things to Do
1. Fall and rise a thousand times if need be.
2. Become a habitual seeker.
3. Give up, then try again.
4. Realize that you want to help others.
5. Be thankful.
6. Become a decent human animal.
7. Look for the source of thoughts.
8. Look in whatever way keeps your attention.
9. Will to do one thing — one iron in the fire.
10. Find a teacher(s).
11. Always desire more, never be content.
12. Surround yourself with fellow seekers.
13. Spend time alone.
14. Know that the Hound of Heaven is real. [see note below]
(Shawn Nevins [source])
…and:
This is an example of the diverse responses that an object may elicit. The object is a book. To an animal, it appears as an oddly shaped black and white object. A primitive human being would see a rectangular flexible object with curious markings. To a Western child it is a book, while to an adult it may be a particular type of book, say, a book that makes incomprehensible, even ridiculous claims about reality. Finally, to a physicist, it may be a profound text on quantum physics.
This example illustrates that all the observers are partly correct in what they see, but all except the trained physicist are unaware of how much more meaningful and significant the object is than they can recognize. To the non physicist adult it is a book that seems incomprehensible — even ridiculous. What this example demonstrates is that when we cannot comprehend higher levels of significance, we can blithely believe that we have fully understood something whose true significance we have completely missed. The more subtle, profound depths tend to be overlooked — and what is crucial to understand is that we will not even recognize that we are overlooking these more profound depths of meaning.
This occurs because the higher levels of significance are lost… As [Buddhist economist E.F.] Schumacher pointed out:
Facts do not carry labels indicating the appropriate level at which they ought to be considered. Nor does the choice of an inadequate level lead the intelligence into factual error or logical contradiction. All levels of significance — up to the adequate level, i.e., up to the level of meaning in the example of the book, are equally factual, equally logical, equally objective, but not equally real… When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious — an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.
This raises an arresting question: what higher levels of significance, what profound meanings and messages, does the world give us that we are overlooking?
(Roger Walsh, edited by Helen Palmer [source (in somewhat different form)])
…and (last paragraph):
In America people do not look at each other publicly much…
I remember my first experience as a café sitter in Europe. There is staring that startles the American. I tried to analyze it and came out with the realization that the European interested is really interested in just ordinary people and makes a study of a man with his eyes in public. What a pleasure and an art it was to study back, and a relief to me as a young more or less educated American, with still echoing in the mind his mother’s “Don’t stare!” (I still cannot point at anything in public.) But I stare and stare at people, shamelessly…
Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.
(Walker Evans [source])
From elsewhere:
Everything in this world which seems to lack harmony is in reality the limitation of man’s own vision. The wider the horizon of his observation becomes, the more harmony of life he enjoys. In the very depth of man’s being the harmony of the working of the whole universe is summed up in a perfect music.
(Hazrat Inayat Khan [source])
…and (excerpt):
Trance Essay for Remembering Images
Someone I was hoping to kiss informed me
that it’s easy to rememberimages (all you have to do, they said, is take
a lesson from a children’s book, one in which a girl couldremember anything she wanted by saying “click,”
and imagining she held a camera).
(Diana Hamilton [source])
…and:
Old Jewish joke:
The celebrated rabbi is on his deathbed. His students are lined up in order of seniority to pay their respects, awaiting his final words with bated breath. Eventually, and with effort, the rabbi opens his eyes, then addresses his most senior student. ‘Life,’ he declares, ‘is a river.’ The student turns to the next most senior, and the message gets carried down the line: ‘The rabbi says life is a river.’ ‘The rabbi says life is a river.’ Only the most junior student, the last to receive the words, is naive enough to venture a question. ‘But what does the rabbi mean, “life is a river”?’ The query comes back up the line, until the senior student, trembling at the audacity of questioning the master, manages to blurt it out. ‘My rabbi, I’m sorry, but what do you mean, “life is a river”?’
The old man is moments from expiring. But for one last time, he opens his eyes, and regards the student in unblinking silence. Then he shrugs, and turns up his palms.
‘All right,’ he says. ‘So it’s not a river!’
(Oliver Burkeman [source])
…and:
The United States Welcomes You
Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light? What are you demanding
That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then
What is that leaping in your chest? What is
The nature of your mission? Do you seek
To offer a confession? Have you anything to do
With others brought by us to harm? Then
Why are you afraid? And why do you invade
Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute
As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess?
Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we
Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?
(Tracy K. Smith [source])
____________
Note about “the Hound of Heaven”: I’m embarrassed to confess how deep and complex was the rabbit hole down which this phrase led me. When I tracked down the source of the whiskey river quotation, I found this note about the “hound” in question:
Refers to the poem by Francis Thompson. There is something calling you – God, Rose’s Invisible Current, or the Voice of the Silence. Become aware of your intuition (heart), your hunger and yearning for certainty. You hide with endless diversions from your hunger and yearning. You fill the emptiness in you with material goods, or even love. Yet, you are truly, always alone. There is simply you and a haunting question that sooner or later you must confront.
So then of course I wanted to learn something about the poem in question — and then to figure out what “Rose’s Invisible Current” referred to, and the Voice of the Silence, ditto, and— well, as I said, it kept branching and branching and branching… Maybe this was the lesson of the whole post today!
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