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#4168 - Friday, February
18, 2011 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
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Nonduality: Enumerating Being
-James Traverse
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Dear Jerry,
Thank you again for the highlights. I enjoy them daily.
After reading James Traverse's interpretation of King
Lear, I was remembering some insight I wrote to those
calling for guidance, regarding the notion of being a
"fool". I have pasted it below
To your deepest peace, joy, and unconditional fulfillment.
Love and namaste,
Ellen Davis
www.ellendavis.org
5-2-10
Looking now I see that fools are the figments of a judgmental
imagination. Stepping into the shoes of a fool is stepping
into freedom from those judgments. It is finding yourself
in a suit that has finally lost its hook and turns into all of
those magical colors.
;-)
The fool is our feared future or what we look back upon with
judgment. Standing here as we are, one with all,
nottwo, no matter how broken we might have thought
ourselves to be, who separate is there to judge?
~~~
Today I got an essay by Scott Morrison. At one point he
said, "If you truly give yourself up completely, it will
shock your whole system. It will suddenly dawn on you, "Oh
my God, what a fool I've been! What was I thinking?""
That is the feeling. Yet, if you are still with that, and give
yourself up really completely, there is no one left to judge the
fool or the ignorance... and if you keep your heart open, there
is compassion for that ignorance.
The vision of the fool is also the fear of death .. of your
death....of the identity that you have held to so tightly.
Let yourself be the fool and it will be the death of what hooks
you and your shackles. The fool or joker's garb is the
colors of the charade they have given up - but that they can wear
proudly without embarrassment because they themselves are not
fixed to their own identity, nor do they believe the thoughts
about it; it is a brightly colorful reflection to all that see it
of all that they fear. The fool laughs knowing that there
is no fool but for the one who fears being one.
Here is something i wrote in 1999 about being a fool:
One must be willing to be a fool. Only fools take
risks. What do you think jumping into the unknown is,
reasonable? Actually, when you know that the mind is a
circuitous trap, it is reasonable. Fool is a term
coming out of what other people think. So being willing to be a
fool is being willing to sacrifice your appearance to the
world. A very courageous thing to do.
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Jerry,
Thank you and other editors for producing NDhighilghts. It's a
sanity-touchstone and frequently a source of delight for me.
When I was in engineering school more than 50 years ago, a vague
but persistent impulse led me to buy and keep books about
philosophy, psychology, and history , among them Science and
Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. For the past 30 years my path has led
thru deeper layers of mind – personal crisis and recovery,
long vipassana meditation retreats, Jungian analysis, hypnosis,
travel to India to be with Poonja, and connection with Ramana and
Nisargadatta by reading. Many of my books mysteriously survived
and traveled with me. Gradually I have reconnected with the
human drama without being absorbed by it; that has been
accompanied by turning to my old library and continuing
reading with a changed perspective.
A thought arose in my mind about Science and Sanity, which I had
not finished nor thought about for decades. I immediately found
the book on a shelf within arm's reach. My interest went to
Chapter XIX "Mathematics as a Language of a Structure
Similar to the Structure of the Human Nervous System"; the
apparent correspondence between mathematics and the
"outside" world has puzzled me since engineering
school. The following statement by Korzsybski jumped off
the page for me:
The problems of "formalism" are of serious and
neglected psycho-logical importance, and are connected with great
semantic dangers in daily life if associated with the lack of
consciousness of abstracting; or, in other words when we confuse
the orders of abstractions. Indeed, the majority of
"mentally" ill are too formal in their psych-logical,
one-, two- or few-valued processes and so cannot adjust
themselves to the ∞-valued experiences of life.
Formalism is only useful in the search for, and test of,
structure; but, in that case, the consciousness of abstracting
makes the attitude behind formal reasoning ∞-valued
and probable, so that semantic disturbances and shocks in
life are avoided. Let us be simple about it: the mechanism of the
semantic disturbance , called "identification", or
"the confusion of orders of abstractions" in general,
and "objectification" in particular, is, to a
large extent, dependent on two-valued formalism without the
consciousness of abstracting.
Alfred Korzybski
Science and Sanity, 1933, Chapter V, Mathematics a
Non-Aristotelian Language, p 276
That struck me as an elegant description of being lost in
dualism; and the inverse implies non-dual awareness. An impulse
arose to share this with you, probably because of your interest
in science and non-dualism.
Kind regards,
BF