So this blog has hit on the problem of naming rivers as an exactly way to describe the two principle ways of being.
(1) We can consider the whole stretch of water as a single river. Which is fine in some contexts like navigating and finding our way around through a landscape. This is the Platonic view where particular things are linked through a central static perfect self.
(2) However it becomes a problem when we try and relate to the reality of the river. Clearly not all points of a river are the same, and as Heraclitus points out in fact we could never visit the same river twice because even if we went to the same spot 10 years later it would have changed. And that change is not just sudden. While some change like a flood is dramatic and change happens quickly, it is a sliding scale. An individual rain drop causes a tiny amount of change as it displaces a few grains of dirt. And the elephant in this room of course is that the water is always flowing. The water that actually makes up the body of the river is never the same even a few seconds apart. So we cannot fix the "reality" of a river, and we can never encounter the same experience twice. This is the "flux" or Heraclitan view of reality.
Now we noted that the Tigris river is definitely a thing. It is recorded through history and its waters famously irrigated the first agricultural societies of humanity. However it never meets the sea. It joins with the Euphrates and forms the Shatt Al Arab river which enters the sea. If you are sailing down river on the Tigris you don't need to get out of the water and move to the Shatt Al Arab the water from one river flows into the next. And yet you would never notice as you said down river. This change of rivers is not "real" it never actually happens. And yet the Tigris and Shatt al Arab definitely exist. How is this possible?
So broadly philosophers say that the rigid naming arises through convention. It is something that people learn when they learn to speak the language. And people fishing at one end of the river will use Tigris without issue. Only those who come into contact with the people down the other end who fish the Euphrates enter into issues. And travellers too who cross the river valleys will be interested to give them different names. Eventually maps will combine all these communities into "rigid" names. But the working communities in the various rivers don't face well when they come to the confluences.
We can see that the process of naming (in contrast to theories like Kripke and Putnam) have nothing to do with actual things. They are complex interactions of communities with resources. When we make the mistake of thinking names refer to actual things we find boundary problems of how to name things like confluence waters. As argued in previous blogs Kripke and Putnam's view is most likely linked to a view of their Jewish community as a fixed and historical chain of events from the initial baptism of Abraham by God. Such conservatism and desire for Universality is the key signature of Imperialism, Totalitarianism and Fascism. The problem is that such theories find a rigidity in their language and seek to explain this by proposing a rigidity to the world. But you can't explain rigidity in terms of "rigidity" that is circular and that is what pulls the rug on Kripke and Putnam and Jewish thinking in general. Now defenders will say that is Anti-Semitic but to make that claim defenders must drop essentialism and rigidity and that also feeds into Kripke and Putnam to refute the idea of an rigid designator.
Now like most of these blog entries this has burrowed deep and revised the original subject matter without moving forward.
The point here is to note that swimming in or sailing on the real river Tigris we do not notice the names. And this is the experience of meditation. Sailing down river we will completely miss the move onto the Shatt al Arab unless we are using GPS or closely following the map.The river itself just confluences with the Euphrates water and carries on with no noticeable break.
This captures another key idea of "inter-dependence." Inter-dependence can look like the world is just a puree soup with no discrete things and nothing being itself, everything mixed up in one gloop. This is wrong. Things are themselves just like the Tigris. You can definitely swim in this without it being the land. A river is not land. However that said there are no exact boundaries. Climbing out of the Tigris at what point are you in it and then out of it? You go through a blurred edge. This blurred edge and possibility of being both in the river and out of the river at the same time shows that our crude labelling of river and land doesn't exactly fit. It is this possibility of being both that shows us that the labelling and the things are different. And while they are blurred from the perspective of labelling and language and mind, the reality is very smooth. We are swimming and we get out without any great crisis and sudden transition. Our experience of the world is very smooth and things transition not exactly although sometimes much faster than others. When a car crashes we are sudden projected into a rapidly changing situation. But it is still a gradual transition through events. The discreteness is all done by the mind. The I am here and now I am here is not real, it is done by the mind.
This also fits perfectly with Emptiness/Sunjata. Emptiness is not saying that the world is "nothing" and it is not saying that it is "solid" and it is not saying it is both nor is it saying it is neither. Emptiness is the fact that the world can transition so smoothly. When we climb out of the Tigris onto the land there are no sudden in-water/on-land events. The world blurs between these and we can be both. That is a problem for the mind which is furiously processing to try and catch up and fit into either category. But if we ignore the mind and language for a second and just climb out of the river than it is a smooth reality. Perhaps we slip and fall back in, perhaps we get half out and find a firm footing for a final step out, but then we are standing in a pool of water that drips off us. When we watch the world as it really is we see it flows into and out of categories. And that flow means that it can be both and neither. The hard thing for the mind is to learn to accept that its categories while essential for language and thinking are overlays on a world that is a flowing experiencing. And that experience escapes the world of language. That process of realising that it escapes the world of the mind is what is called letting go and when we do this fully we are Enlightened.
Of course the hardest thing to let go of is the "self" the "me" or "I". We don't tend to acknowledge smooth transitions into and out of "me." While getting out of the Tigris can be seen as a continual process, we are very unlikely to be happy with seeing it as not happening to someone discrete. While we can slip into being someone and be proud and egotistical and slip out just as easily, we tend to grasp at being someone and attribute what happens to that. But this is just linguistic and mind adding rigidity to reality.
Letting go is a mysterious thing. It operates outside the world of the mind. You can't think yourself into letting go. It comes from outside the mind, like divine inspiration. One minute we are obsessed with something, the next we are cool. One minute our grip is firmly on something, even something unpleasant, and the next it falls away.
This is like the person who has dreamed of swimming in the Tigris ever since finding it in ancient stories and writings. Eventually they go on holiday and find that the river is too violent for tour guides to let them swim. In the end they can only swim in an enclosure in the Shatt al Arab near the sea. They are dismayed and return home sad and disappointed that their trip was a failure and they never got to swim in the Tigris. And yet on reflection they realise that the waters that they had swum in were both Tigris and Euphrates and their experience a joining of multiple ancient myths, legends and histories. True they were not able to add to the legends of the Tigris by swimming in the designated area, but regarding the truth of that river and what is really is they indeed engaged with those waters in a purely unique and special way. Being attached and unable to let go is exactly this. Rigid mental constructs, history, expectations and all the boundaries created by the brain block us from experiencing the world as it really is. Letting go is acknowledging the mind, but also putting it down to just be with and in the world. Meditation is this training of being able to drop the mind. And critically when done easily we can drop the mental construct of the "I" and experience the world as it is without hanging it on some special person who we imagine is central to experience, but which once we learn to put them down we see has no part to play at all.
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