Shinran suggests that action proceeds out of our experience (we do things because of what we feel, and feeling is not something in our control.) Our experience is determined by what we suffer, from the whole world, so that karma determines the experience that determines our actions. But karma is defined as the result of individual actions, insofar as we receive evil for evil we have done in past lives, or vice versa for good. This is impossible, however, because the basis in action is not of an individual will, but of feeling. Thus, there is simply no room left for the individual actor, and it becomes just another aspect of karma--some feeling we suffer from based on our past lives. Then our past lives also lose their causal aspect.
What we have left over after all of this reduction are flows of feeling over time. But what, then, is karma except this feeling, and how does it act as a causal principle connecting actions to experiences? Action, too, is rolled up into feeling; it can do no other, once we give up a notion of the world as a physical mediation between different selves who act and inflict upon each other certain experiences.
The physical world might also fold away insofar as it is a plane in which matter shows up, to cause feelings for subjects and to serve as bodies, instruments, and scenes in the acts of others. But not so fast. Natural events--events that are not motivated out of an experience at all, but happen by impersonal process-- have a karmic upshot too. This is not abrogated, surely, because it does not proceed out of an individual cause. In fact, it is extended. All action falls out of control and becomes physical; and yet, the individual soul as the bearer of karmic evil or good can no longer serve as the connector between these physical events and events in feeling. There must, instead, be a direct connection--one of karma, which inflicts upon itself as both cause and reception, according to the physicality. We are left with a continuum of matter/feeling, with feeling inseparable at any point from the physicality.
This continuum has no external landmark; it has no fixed point outside itself, by which the continuum could be absolutized. A continuum where every value is the beginning, and none is the end. But somewhere something happens. An event wholly contingent, whose precise workings we may not describe here. Though we can say that this event serves as a direction for all feeling/matter. The twins of nirvana and entropy. All excitation of matter and feeling--intense as it is in brains, in suns, in a living planet--give way to cold, converging at the spiritual/physical point of absolute zero. Mind is contained in its end, nirvana. The world in its end, the cold. Nirvana is not a feeling, absolute zero is not a temperature (ie: not a movement.) They are both still. Both are points--are the self-same point, only repeated--in which all things tend.
Together they serve to create a direction for all directions; all movement tends towards absolute zero, no matter what direction it is traveling. All feeling tends towards nirvana, regardless of whether it is good or bad or whichever passion it may be. How does this happen, though? How does the world and the mind have an end? The end is a fixture of a phenomenological, spatial view. And, as we have suggested, the mind is organized spatially, and is the product of a repetition of spatial resources, to serve other purposes.. And we see, fully, what this spatial processing system, in a monkeys, amounts to: the creation of a stillness that contrasts itself to any moving, vibrant scene. An invisible star in the sky that never deviates in our sight no matter where we turn. There is always an object just outside of the screen that serves as a frame of reference. no--there is always a screen itself, to frame the action in.
But how did the repetition occur, whereby there became inner and outer space? It needed a pivot, and found it precisely in that stillness. The stillness provided the repetition, the fictional territory of the beyond. As no-space, it was precisely the only space possible for the repetition of space. Mind is stillness; but desire, excitation. Desire is movement, and in the act--the bodily act, as in dancing (would that I could dance...)--tears down the wall between the two. There is no inner space and outer, for instance, in the sexual act. But often our actions are chained in projection; desire against movement, a death instinct. the desire that desires alienation. repression. The Aristotelian desire, that desires the sphere outside all things. The desire that dwells in fantasies; even acts not of reality, but only of fantasy. Fantasy populates the inner space, and is always fantasy except when it moves, in love. To nourish, protect, build.
No comments:
Post a Comment