#30. Dream or Nightmare? replied by RonPrice @ Wed, 21 May 2008 13:45:21 -0000

RonPrice — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:45:21 -0000

I just joined this site and this thread was the first I read. Let me respond by posting some of my memoirs that address some of what you write about here. I hope you find it useful and I invite your comment: Ron Price, Tasmania
—-—-—-
Autobiography’s ultimate purpose, Henry James felt, was to fix the self for all time, to put forth the idea that the autobiographer matters and that his life is significant in the supposed order of things. I certainly like to think my life matters, that it has meaning in the ultimate scheme of things, that in writing this autobiography I am not merely imposing form on chaos, that all that I think is not merely an exercise in subjectivity, that my life is not so deeply private as to be beyond scientific scrutiny, that it derives its importance from factors beyond that which is unsystematic, even chaotic, uncommunicable and emotional in life.

The scientific domain contains an important element of subjectivity and total objectivity is always impossible or so it seems ot me. One of the key elements of science is that it exists in, indeed generates, a community, a framework, of interpretation. Indeed, the scientist can only function within such a community. That is also true, at least in some ways, for this autobiographer. We all exist in some community of interpretation. The community in question for me is a spiritual one and, more generally, the human community.

What makes my work scientific is that I am engaged in a “conscious, explicit organization of knowledge and experience.” I am not just engaged in making true statements. One can do this in any quiz or game like trivial pursuit. Proof, in scientific terms and in autobiography, “means nothing more than the total process by which we render a statement more acceptable than its negation.” An important caveat here is that the convictions I bring to this exercise, my feelings of certitude, indeed much that I might call tentative hypotheses for example, are part of a psychological state not part of my knowledge. Certitude can often be had with no knowledge at all and hypotheses are things anyone can make. Our emotions organize themselves around our convictions and become part of our way of life. This is one’s faith, one’s religion. And we all have a religion in this sense; there exists around this religion or faith a theoretical uncertainty and it exists for all of us. Such is some of the intellectual orientation, some of my foundation view, that I take to this autobiography.

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal, to assert this autonomy, however permanent it may be, than the creative process itself, the process of composition. The creative self, the source of this process, is a society of perishing occasions or selves and the context is an aesthetic one. The writer’s task is to develop a coherent system of ideas by which every item of his experience can be interpreted. The fundamental building blocks of nature are not bits of passive, inert, dead matter, but momentary unities of experience, actual entities which are involved in a creative advance into novelty. Such was Alfred North Whitehead’s way of looking at the process(1925). Although I have never been a serious student of Whitehead’s, I have been broadly aware of his views for forty years.

Verse really does, in Akhmatova’s words, grow from rubbish among other things. To express this same idea more elegantly, one could say that verse grows out of slime the same way as a lotus flower. The roots of prose are no more honorable. But there in the roots can also be found faith and thought—the lotus flower’s embryo. Without faith and thought no society can long endure and without a common humanity and a practical basis for world order appalling catastrophe threatens to engulf humanity.

As this autobiography has come to take form increasingly since I began writing it over twenty years ago, I have felt a measure of literary and psychological power and humility. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that self-narrative is a tool used to gain self-determinacy. This work is also partly an illness narrative, partly a salvation narrative, partly a travel narrative, as autobiographers often call these sub-genres, and partly an act of becoming and re-becoming. Through self-narration I partly re-make myself, re-fashion and re-invent a new understanding of myself. With this story I try to resist the several disabling definitions that could label my life and so to write myself into/with a rhetorical normalcy. Narrative is used as a tool, a technology, that is intended to be a vehicle to freedom, self-definition, and self-expression. Unlike some writers, I have no obsession with being taken seriously. What consumes many words of many writers in an attempt to be taken seriously, consumes little of mine. I have not set this work before the public with the confidence, still less the complacency, of an established master. This book belongs to my middle and late adulthood. I had no reputation to defend, indeed, I was hardly known anywhere except by coteries so small and insignificant that it might be wondered why I bothered to write this work at all.-Ron

#30. Dream or Nightmare? replied by brian @ Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:37:13 -0000

brian — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 00:37:13 -0000

Love it, James.

All I can say right now is, “Amen!” :)

#30. Dream or Nightmare? replied by James_in_China @ Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:36:23 -0000

James_in_China — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:36:23 -0000

Quibbles, quibbles:

Meta-quibble: “Buddhism”: What’s that? It’s a word coined by Westerners to describe the indescribable. Better, “Buddhisms” (like “Christianities.”) Even “Buddhisms” is tough, though…

Zooming in: “Buddhism tries to…”: As I understand the Buddha, he would not have anyone try anything on you except YOU. “Buddha” means (loosely) “one who is awake.” But the analogy breaks down, because in everyday speech, something usually wakes us—”wake” is transitive. “My alarm woke me,” “My mom woke me,” “My teacher woke me…” But in “Buddhism,” it’s intransitive: “I awoke.” Coming from our paradigms, it’s hard to see how fiercely self-reliant the Buddha called us to be. In time, “Buddhism” developed a powerful strain of what the Japanese call “Tariki,” other power, “the way of the kitten” whose mother carries him/her to safety (cf Joseph Campbell for more). But the foundational “Buddhism” was all “Jiriki,” self power, “the way of the monkey” who must herself/himself cling to the mother or be lost. (This is Theravada Buddhism, and Zen in the Mahayana.) The frightening but ultimately liberating news is: It’s all up to me. No one nor no thing can wake me.

(I know: It’s a figure of speech, “Buddhism tries…” But when we look at pithy, seemingly-wise statements, it doesn’t hurt to unpack them a little.)

Now, to the nub: “Psychologists try…”: I’m not sure how the two statements are meant to articulate. Is “the dream” in the second statement the same as in the first? Then, are the shrinks doing something to the dream before you awake, in place of waking you? That’s a negative read on the art of therapy. Keep they dreaming happily, never let them wake. Or are they helping you wake to an unnightmarish dawn? That’s a positive read.

In either case: “Buddhism” eschews the idea that the dream can be positive or negative. The dream is irrelevant, as the Diamond Sutra says:
As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp,
A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned. (Trans. Conze)

To wake means to see this, and abandon the dream altogether. One incisive statement of the goal of “Buddhism” is: To see things as they really are. Add a corollary: Without judgment. To see the truth of things, without judging it dream or nightmare.

Yikes! a huge can of worms. I recognize that there is much subjectivity in my point of view, yet I feel a strong need to respond when I see “loose talk” about Buddhism. But perhaps some other forum members will take this up and either support me or batter me down…

Read a little more about “Buddhism and Me” in this old essay: http://youarethat.org/foundations/buddhism.htm

#30. Dream or Nightmare? replied by brian @ Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:46:32 -0000

brian — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 04:46:32 -0000

Very cool. Powerful stuff.

Thanks for sharing!

Enjoying seeing how you Report “on the world as it seems to be from where I see it.”

#30. Dream or Nightmare? replied by TravisE @ Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:13:35 -0000

TravisE — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:13:35 -0000

Very interesting indeed! I wrote a blog along these lines not long ago. http://www.traviseneix.com/square-peg-round-hole/

#30. Dream or Nightmare? replied by brian @ Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:43:08 -0000

brian — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 22:43:08 -0000

Just looking through my journal from the week I spent at the Integral Institute’s Integral Life Practice seminar. (Great stuff, btw.)

Found these scribbles:

Buddhism tries to wake you up from your dream.

Psychologists try to make sure the dream doesn’t become a nightmare.