Archivo de la etiqueta: Critique of Pure Reason

The logical ballerinas: “Meditation”

 

These are, more or less, the thoughts that occur in my mind when I let the logical ballerina “Meditation” dance inside it:

1.- “Meditation” is another word, another logical dancer, and, as such, is constructed from dream-logical, unsayable tissues. According to my own experience, in meditation state you can hear and smell the primeval silence of the dance hall where all the logical dancers yearn to dance.

2.- Meditation allows us to deactivate “temporarily” our entire cosmos. That cosmos hibernates while meditating. Every meditating individual being will return to his sacred dream (his life if you want) and place (interpret) the experience of meditation on the logical shelves that this dream offers: his personal choreography of logical dancers, if you want to put it this way.

3.- Meditation does not last ten minutes, nor an hour. It does not have “duration”. It is a meta-temporal experience because it implies, one might say, a deactivation of that time-constructing psychic machinery described by Kant; among others. Although, truly, meditation is neither an “experience” nor “human”, nor is it, therefore, “meditation” (as an activity that presupposes a subject).

4.- The return. Something that I have been observing for years in me and in other people who have meditated with me is that “the return” amplifies and sublimates the cosmos in which it is experienced, no matter which cosmos. Perhaps because any cosmos is a transparent bubble that, in silence, allows us to see the prodigy within it hovers. After the “return”, anyway, the world (our cosmos) would recover its clean, primeval smell: the smell of dawn on the sleeping land. Simone Weil [See here still in Spanish] put it this way: “Only dis-creating myself can I participate in Creation.” [See “Concept”]. Meditation could perhaps be defined as a process of dying and being reborn in the cosmos in which we died; feeling thus the smell of the first illusion, of the first dream of love.

5.- In “Machine” [See here] I suggest that the human being does not manufacture machines, but lives instead in a machine -a sacred machine- that manufactures machines through him. Everything is artificial. And everything is natural. In meditation state we feel that the force that is directed and controlled by such titanic multi-cosmical machinery is our own, but also that  we are not really “human beings”. There is an “inner” switch to “temporary” deactivate that cosmos-machine in which we live: Meditation. The “exterior switch” would be “Grace” [See here still in Spanish].

6. Kant made an enormous effort in his Critique of Pure Reason in order to mark the limits of human knowledge (of any knowledge indeed). And he drew a kind of island – the island of the knowable- surrounded by a tempestuous ocean, inaccessible to reason but also irresistible to it. It could be said that in meditation state we toss our consciousness into that ocean from the last cliff of our insular mind (and heart). And we return wet. Of water? No. Of ourselves: we are that overwhelming ocean that Kant considered unknowable. And the island might be our own work, made with our own metaphysical entrails.

7.- I think it is also useful to affirm from this cosmos that now spells us (the cosmos from which I write and you read) that the human being does not meditate. In meditation the universal “human being”, that noun, that concept [See “Concept”], that self-spell is deactivated. In meditation state one is not a human being [See “Human being”], nor a “citizen”, nor a “worker”, nor an “entrepreneur”, nor a “liberated woman”, nor a “son of God”, nor a “result of evolution”,  nor “a spot where the universe knows itself “. We might talk about an irruption of what has no essence (omnipotent nothingness) in one of its infinite creations. This last sentence is the most I can say within this dream; within this linguistic machinery. In meditation state you are no longer a “human being” but you have “the feeling” (if you can talk like that) of having finally returned to yourself: of having never been so much yourself.

8.- From a materialist-panmatematist perspective the state of meditation would be a necessary consequence of the interaction of the laws of nature on the Matter of our brain. If so, we should sacralize Mathematics and its capacity for reconfiguration of Matter [See “Matter”]. But meditation implies a deactivation of speeches, of seemingly legalized dreams: and the scientist-materialist discourse is a dream. A very useful dream. All dreams are useful. A clash between discourses on meditation is shown in the following broadcast of the Sternstunde Philosophie program on Swiss television (the presenter is Barbara Bleisch and she interviews Richard Davidson and Theodore Zeldin):

“Alle meditieren. Wer verändert die Welt?” [They all meditate. Who changes the world?]

9.- When dealing with the word “Light” [See here still in Spanish] I share the old feeling and idea that the source of all light (including the source of light that describes the current Physics) is an absolute darkness: there you can not see nor think. It could be said that to meditate means to climb “light up” until the darkness of the first spring. And, once there, to stop being -to be annihilated- in the sacred nothingness that transcends the existence/non-existence dualism. “After” (an “after” without time) we might return to the stream, and flow in it, knowing its source and its ending.

Thanks to meditation we can love our mind: that place of wonders, that wizard’s workshop, that dance room always available for my dear logical dancers. But in order to love our mind we must be able to contemplate it as the one who looks at his sleeping son.

David López

This Philosophy blog does not have advertising or institutional support. And I don’t have the financial resources to sustain it and to develop it. However, I do have an enormous amount of ideas and philosophical projects still to be developed and communicated. For all these reasons, if you believe that the work I am offering here has value, please consider making a donation (through the “Donate” button). Your help can be decisive for the survival of this project. I give you my word.