This has been brewing inside me for sometime, now I'll try to sketch its outline here, briefly.
Starting my own experience. The first thing I did when back from my friend who’s seriously depressed, together with other bad news from New Haven, was sit down and meditate. I sank into a deep slumber deeper than normal sleep. Since then I stick to it. I didn't insist, but it's rather an inner need. As I read more about Indian body culture I came to be convinced that the obvious effect it bears on my mind, pacifying and clarifying for the least, is through cleansing of my nerve system.
Deep meditation is one of the eight limbs of yoga, which means connection, connecting the individual being with the universal, the atman, the being of the self, with the Brahman, the foundation of all beings. This Indian spiritual practice/body culture/philosophy (it is hard, almost impossible to bind it down with one of the terms) has much to say to the old fight between free will and bio-chemical power, or between mind and body. If we are to separate mind and body, at least we've got to admit that they are two end of one same band, the stretching of one end will stretch the other end by moving the whole band.
That's where Hindu culture comes into conversation with Heidegger, Meleau-Ponty, and Wordsworth. In a Wordsworthan moment, or a special kind of lyrical moment, when Wordswroth focuses all his attention on daffodils, or standing before a tomb for an hour, the mind-body is one, which are “yogaed,” connected, banded with the oneness of the world, the beings. Heidegger states two major modes of Dasein's existence: being-in-the-world and being-along-with-the-other. Neither of them takes into account of at least another major, though rarer, mode of Dasein's existence, namely the Wordsworthian, lyrical connection with the beings, or rather, the Being. This third mode can be theorized, if we have to theorize, as one of the manifestations of the human being's natural tendency to merge into the oneness of beings. This major mode of being has its vital foundation, which can be explained by Yoga culture and enhanced by practice of it. Of course, Hindu culture, especially the yoga culture would have a fruitful conservation with Meleau-Ponty, whom developed what Heidegger didn't mention much, the body in Dasein's being.
Now it is Hindu culture with its subtle ideas of Minody (my coinage) which will hold strongly against any reductionism. The many humanists' good-willed insistence on free will is more or less vain, before the strong explanatory power of science, ever getting stronger after Frued and Darwin. It is heoric but not quite effective to resist it by giving up the majority of territory and insisting on one small patch of ground. "Yes, it's all decided by the bio-chemical, but that I'm here to argue for free will is not by that, but by my own free will itself." The framework in which this argument is made is false, out-dated, partial. Look at the number of people practising Yoga today, and the rate of its booming, even though most people are just doing the Asana part (bodily postures) of yoga for health benefits, but even only Asana's effect on the nerve system is more than obvious. It makes you feel good because it is cleansing your nervous system. I believe science will have to examine and try to understand it. And after, the society will absorb it into its fiber and it will eventually change the way we think about our Minody, our being, our way of living. And with meditation, the shallow reductionism either to body or mind, or superficial devision, will be shed away like old skin. They are not even something to fight against, being so far away from the deep being of human.
I guess I'm a bit preachy in writing all this. I've started a reading project to explore Hindu culture, and have finished Gitanjali and Siddhartha, moving on to the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, The Upanishads, Lotus Sutra. I am also planning a longish trip to India some time soon. I’ll say more when I have had more experience in both meditation, Asana and my trip of India.
Deep meditation is one of the eight limbs of yoga, which means connection, connecting the individual being with the universal, the atman, the being of the self, with the Brahman, the foundation of all beings. This Indian spiritual practice/body culture/philosophy (it is hard, almost impossible to bind it down with one of the terms) has much to say to the old fight between free will and bio-chemical power, or between mind and body. If we are to separate mind and body, at least we've got to admit that they are two end of one same band, the stretching of one end will stretch the other end by moving the whole band.
That's where Hindu culture comes into conversation with Heidegger, Meleau-Ponty, and Wordsworth. In a Wordsworthan moment, or a special kind of lyrical moment, when Wordswroth focuses all his attention on daffodils, or standing before a tomb for an hour, the mind-body is one, which are “yogaed,” connected, banded with the oneness of the world, the beings. Heidegger states two major modes of Dasein's existence: being-in-the-world and being-along-with-the-other. Neither of them takes into account of at least another major, though rarer, mode of Dasein's existence, namely the Wordsworthian, lyrical connection with the beings, or rather, the Being. This third mode can be theorized, if we have to theorize, as one of the manifestations of the human being's natural tendency to merge into the oneness of beings. This major mode of being has its vital foundation, which can be explained by Yoga culture and enhanced by practice of it. Of course, Hindu culture, especially the yoga culture would have a fruitful conservation with Meleau-Ponty, whom developed what Heidegger didn't mention much, the body in Dasein's being.
Now it is Hindu culture with its subtle ideas of Minody (my coinage) which will hold strongly against any reductionism. The many humanists' good-willed insistence on free will is more or less vain, before the strong explanatory power of science, ever getting stronger after Frued and Darwin. It is heoric but not quite effective to resist it by giving up the majority of territory and insisting on one small patch of ground. "Yes, it's all decided by the bio-chemical, but that I'm here to argue for free will is not by that, but by my own free will itself." The framework in which this argument is made is false, out-dated, partial. Look at the number of people practising Yoga today, and the rate of its booming, even though most people are just doing the Asana part (bodily postures) of yoga for health benefits, but even only Asana's effect on the nerve system is more than obvious. It makes you feel good because it is cleansing your nervous system. I believe science will have to examine and try to understand it. And after, the society will absorb it into its fiber and it will eventually change the way we think about our Minody, our being, our way of living. And with meditation, the shallow reductionism either to body or mind, or superficial devision, will be shed away like old skin. They are not even something to fight against, being so far away from the deep being of human.
I guess I'm a bit preachy in writing all this. I've started a reading project to explore Hindu culture, and have finished Gitanjali and Siddhartha, moving on to the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, The Upanishads, Lotus Sutra. I am also planning a longish trip to India some time soon. I’ll say more when I have had more experience in both meditation, Asana and my trip of India.
3 comments:
I think we must always exist in a schizophrenic state ever after the consciousness. The moment of the mind-body singularity, and its radical separatedness... Perhaps this is the ultimate question in the religious sect: withholding one's own enlightenment and plunging back into society so as to affect change or abandoning society and pursuing a self-actualization.
This is the schizophrenia-unresolved and hence the subject of existentialism.
I think this quote of Marx is absolutely brilliant: "Religion is for us no more the ground but merely the phenomenon of worldly limitedness! We explain therefore the religious bias of the free citizen on the basis of his worldly bias. We do not maintain that these citizens should get rid of their religious chains, in order to eliminate their worldly chains. We assert that they eliminate their religious chains as soon as they have eliminated their worldly ones." (Marx Engels Works 1:352)
Another way to phrase the schizophrenia: immense beauty or total responsibility
Whichever you take as the most outer border delimits your world (and in some sense trivializes the other).
What is paradoxical is that Marxism, as a bearer of the Enlightenment tradition, ultimately privileges the mind over the body (or should we say the senses), that in some sense the unification of the body and the mind is achieved through the mind. The aesthetic if not ascetic tradition in some sense privileges the body and the techne of the body over the rational mind in achieving unification. In the former, unification is predominantly aimed towards society; in the latter towards the individual.
But of course, Hegel has argued that the individual is the negative absolute, the presentation of a "culture 'of bifucation'(Entzweiung)", the split of ethical whole (das Sittliche) has created. (see Critique, Norm, and Utopia, p23) As Seyla Benhabib states, "The sphere of negative absolute - of economics - is now seen as a sacrifice which the ethical, like a benevolent God, makes of itself. Allowing itself to become its other, but recognizing itself in this otherness, it returns to itself and is one with itself. Modern economics represents the comedy of the ethical, but the act of alienation though which it comes into being is the tragedy of the ethical. The standpoint of speculative philosophy allows us to understand the tragedy in the comedy of ethical life, and to see the necessity of reconciliation." (CNU, 29).
The Marxist appropriation of Hegel is to take Hegel's transcendent dialectic and critique it. Benhabib states that Young Hegelians, for the Marxists, "stands outside the object it criticizes" and "privileges an Archimedean standpoint." (CNU,33) For the Marxists, the contradiction between the universal and the individual is endemic to this particular mode of production. That is, Hegel is right to claim the Entzweiung but fails to see the objective nature of this bifurcation, that the split is precisely the logic governing this mode of production, these social relations, rather than a the dialectic of a transcendent reality.
But nonetheless, the schizophrenic moment comes like a bat to the face. Poetry and Beauty, those immediate sensations, are objects which comes to us ex nihilo (at least seemingly, until we explain it away). The point is to abandon one or the other but to encapsulate that schizophrenia! To believe and not believe... isn't this the life of pondering?
This website is relevant and interesting:
http://www.mindandlife.org/
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