The Real Core of Life...

The core of life seems to be this issue of "difference". It sounds trivial but the sheer volume of its representation in world philosophy and religion surely says something.

I've met it in many incarnations. In Structuralist philosophy with the likes of Saussure and Derrida on the Continental side and Strawson on the Anglo-American. The words of language gain their meaning from their difference, one from another, so the philosophers argue. Things, that is, gain their meaning not from what they are, but from their difference from other things. Note "things" and "words" cannot be distinguished in Structuralism since any distinction can only be expressed in language and that distinction is exactly what gives the words their use and meaning. Language is an interconnected web in Stawson's imagination.

I met it again in Plato and his puzzling over the relationship between words and things. How, he wondered all those millenia ago, can a word "correctly" or "incorrectly" be applied to a thing? In the Thaeatetus he ponders the seeing of a man approach who at first is too far away to recognise and then gradually becomes the form of a friend. The man approaching never changes as he is who he is, but for Plato a big change occurs as he goes from being a stranger to a friend. There seems to be an insurmountable gap between the word and the thing. Wittgenstein wonders equally at the bizarre correspondence between a red thing before his eyes and this innocuous word "red". What possible relationship do they have? and how can it be correct or incorrect? This is Wittgenstein the proto-Structuralist who understood clearly that "use" and "practical skill" gives meaning and correctness to our language.

Then again in Buddhism where it forms the central theme although well hidden. Our ignorant mind is so called because it sees "difference" everywhere. This is best shown up in the issue of status that I've discussed at length over the past year. We consider some quality important like height, or beauty, or money. We then consider ourselves in relation to another with regards to this quality. We discover that this person is shorter, or more handsome, or poorer. This fact is not what we are seeking however; the fact by itself is irrelevant. What do we make of the fact that star Centaur-alpha is closer than Orion-gamma? Yet if we are comparing we probably have a view on which is "good" or "bad".

So we find that we have more money than someone. This is just a fact, but we use the fact to raise our "status" and we may decide we are "good". We gain "satisfaction".

Yet we know that elsewhere in the world, as is always the case, there will be someone who has the opposite - someone who has in this case more money than us. So we then reduce our "status" and may decide we are "bad". We become dissatisfied.

Looking one way things seem one way, and looking the other they seem the opposite. How can they be both?

Well we are good status one moment, looking one way, and bad status the next, looking the other, because we have not comprehended that in reality we are not one thing, but both. And we are both at the same time because in reality we are neither. This nonsense arises because we seek to think of ourselves as 1 thing and other things as many things and this means that there are innumerable statuses to be found between all these many things. Yet in reality these many things, or not really many things, we need to learn to see them as many things only when we look at them in one way.

Many grains of sand
Become a beach on which to stand,
When we play volleyball.

It is like climbing a mountain - a metaphor which has gained increasing relevance since I walked Ben Macdui in 2003.

We are standing by a rock on the side of a high mountain looking out at the view. We suddenly see people above us so we start to walk up the mountain. Eventually we meet them and find a place in which to stand. Again we are standing by a rock on the side of a high mountain looking out at the view.

Has that effort changed where we stand? If we were to leave the mountain and stand on another mountain then indeed we would see this dance of ants climbing up the mountain. With this in mind we can imagine that after all that work to climb to a "higher" position we are now "higher". The problem is that to maintain this view of being "higher" we must take up a place in our minds other than where we are.

If our minds take up the place where we are then we are neither higher or lower, we are just standing by a rock looking at the view.

It is interesting that this same situation has been played out in the field of astronomy. We now believe that the earth orbits the sun. Yet I am constantly faced by the observation that the sun clearly starts in the East and sets in the West. I've argued this before and it's not a physical mystery but it does sound odd when people stand beneath a sun that is clearly going around them and swear blindly that it is not happening. We can quickly forget what we are seeing when our minds are set in a particular view.

So it is with status and all things relative - they only have meaning in relationship to sometjing else - they have no value of their own.

Now I'm beginning to see something more clearly - but it is very slow coming.

What Buddha, Jesus and just looking at Tao Te Ching again I see Lao Zi also share is that they taught of an absolute way of looking at the world. The Bodhi Mind, Way of Christ and the Dao all refer to the same thing - an Absolute standpoint from where we can achieve Archimedes great goal of moving the Earth. This place to stand is greater than the sun or any place in the Universe - all these are moving in a sheet of space time which we can't put a reference nail in and measure. The Absolute is a nail in the fabric of reality and unreality since it is Absolute to everything.

It is not a real place - since a real place is relative to the Absolute. We talk "from the standpoint of the Absolute" as I learned to say in Kantian philosophy when talking of the Transcendental.

Normally we grasp for real things to act as our standards like money, but our judgements are then insecure and changeable and relative. From the Absolute (the Dao) things look rather different because they are unchanging. The tall is small and the small is tall. This is the true goal of Life.