Heraclitus says that the world is in flux, always becoming, never become. Nothing is ever stationary, always in motion.
Now this comes as a complete challenge to the normal view which is that things exist exactly, truth is definite and change only happens to initially fixed things. Like a car it is parked and then we take the journey whereupon we park it again. We have time to examine and get to know things before they change.
Heraclitus however says you never actually arrive before you are off on a new journey. Likewise the car itself is never entirely working or broken but always in a state somewhere in between. Even a completely scrapped car can still have parts salvaged to fix other cars and so it lives on not exactly but in part.
Now the problem for me lay in thinking that things were either solid and discrete like marbles in a bag, or liquid and pureed like a soup.
The first one is easy. Each thing is its own marble. But how can a thing both be itself and be in the process of change at the same time?
For a while I imagined that the marbles were really porous nets in a soup, so that while a net could have a discrete contents, that contents was freely moving through it. Thus we have the exact discrete world, over laid on the soup.
This is okay but it tries to merge what are in fact entirely different worlds.
To think about the Heraclitan world we must remove the exact discrete world into a separate plain like an acetate overlay over the Heraclitus world. We should give this acetate world a name and Plato is the most famous proponent of this world.
In the acetate overlay then each thing is a line around a separate region and in this region "is" the thing so drawn around. The contents of this thing have the quality that makes it what it is, and this is called essence. The line around it is like the language and the words and labels that so identify it. In Plato he has a super acetate with just one perfect element for each type of thing, so that this essence is condensed into one ideal perfect overlay. He called this the Forms. Regions of the soup which have the same overlay now become the same thing.
So in fact this is great. Such a world does exist as an overlay and we usually call this the Mind. We can actually see this overlay in action. Below is a picture. It is static and does not change but the Mind can overlay either of two Forms: a young lady or an old lady. The thing to notice is there is no in between the picture has either a discrete old day or young lady overlay. Proof that this world of overlays exists.
But having extracted this world of overlays into its own realm we are really stuck: how to think about the Heraclitan world of flux and soup? We can't go overlaying it!
So the first thing to note is we already over laid it! We are trying to fit it into either a fixed world overlay or a soup overlay! We must remember it is not overlaid! We cannot characterise it.
So this explains the paradox. When we struggle to work out how the world can be soup it is because we are trying to force it into a liquid view. But this is trying to fix it!
So the point of Heraclitus is to turn Plato on its head. Where Plato has things as nodes with change in between as the arcs, Heraclitus has change as the nodes and the arcs are the things.
So for Plato we start with some wood. We either find that in the woods or be go and buy some. We take it somewhere and burn it to change it into Ash. We can then sell that or when ready we add water to dissolve it into fertiliser. Once that is made we can store, sell or the usual. When ready we apply it to plants to encourage their growth to create wood. It is unintentional that this is a cycle but actually everything is eventually.
Now this seems to be the world we live in so what is the point of challenging it. Well
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The point is that Heraclitus is not saying that Flux forces everything into a undefined soup. It just says that everything is only ever in the vicinity of the Platonic overlays. It means that things cannot be described exactly as this or that.
We are recognising that for things to change they must first of all be something and then they can change. But the problem with Plato is that once something is what it is, how does it become something else. You get problems like the Ship of Theseus where as every board in it is replaced we wonder when it stops being the original Ship of Theseus. Once things are absolutely stationary, we have this problem of getting them moving again which seems to be always be a sudden lurch into a new form. The lady either either old or young and we never see anything in between.
Heraclitus may recognise that this is how the brain works but he says that the world is not like this. It is never completely at the end of the journey and nothing is ever completely finished. This does not make the world a chaotic soup, but it does make it an orderly row of statues either. It is in Flux. Perhaps in modern thinking we would say Fuzzy Logic. But this does not capture Heraclitus this just adds a sliding scale to Plato.
Heraclitus is saying that things really are in a state of flux and they are NOT either one thing or the other. Fuzzy Logic cannot let go of things being one thing or the other, it just allow a foot in both camps. Heraclitus is saying there is nowhere to put your discrete foot at all. This is why it is so impossible to grasp.
Now this is where Meditation comes into the picture. Without meditation you are very unlikely to get this.
Meditation starts with Plato. We are commonly asked to watch our breathing and watch whether we are breathing in or out. That is to nice and clear opposing poles. We are either breathing in or out. Easy to place the acetate overlays on the world here. Great. Now do it.
Well we get bored. Plato mind already knows it is either in or out and so there is nothing else to do. Boring.
But Meditation is asking something else. It was put best to me like this.
Close your eyes and put out your hand closed into a fist. Actually do this!
Now what do you feel?
I was in a group of people and one person said "I feel my fist." The teacher said no. For me, the teacher continued, it is like a weight at the end of my arm.
The teacher asked what do you feel and the student has said what they thought! This is seeing the world through the Platonic acetate overlay. When asked what do you feel this challenges that overlay and perhaps we get to see what is being overlaid.
When we meditate we may be able to see two things. The mental overlay of what is there like the "in breath" but perhaps we also start to see the actual breath which isn't really clearly one thing or the other. The "in breath" for example takes a few seconds. Are we saying we are just sitting there with "in breath" flashing up and nothing else? What is actually there has many parts. There are sensations in our belly, chest, nose, and even on our cheek if we really concentrate on the flow of air in and out of our nostril. And these change during the in breath. There is the turning around, the main breath and then the slowing down and stopping at the end as we develop the out breath. the point is that looking at the sensations of what is really happening we find no discrete events.
Pursuing this watching of what is "really" going on we start to see what Heraclitus is talking about. The breath is not a single thing, but a process in time and the transition from "in" to "out" is not a switch but a wheel. Breathing being in flux is not saying it is soup, and it is not saying it is exactly this or that, it is saying it is a journey and a process with no particular points.
One pitfall here is in the words used of watching "sensations." In the West this implies that someone is watching and someone is experiencing those sensations. This is a clear mistake. Are not experiences the actual events of experience. No one needs to then experiences the experiences! So when we talk about watching sensations there are in fact just sensations. There is no one sensing the sensations! Kind of obvious but a really really common mistake.
So to conclude. What meditation actually does is start a process of losing what Buddhism calls "attachment" to the world of Form and the acetate over lay. By focusing instead on sensation rather than thoughts we get to see a world that is not discrete and is instead fluid and in gradual motion. It does not mean the mind closes down, it means we learn how to remove the acetate overlays and understand what putting them back actually does.
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