Enlightenment (part 1)

Foreword

I an hesitant to say anything about enlightenment, as ever word feels like a lie, or at best a sloppy half truth. But I have faith in you, my reader, to look beyond the mere meaning of these words, so please if you read on, do so with an open heart. "What do you mean by 'read with an open heart'?" you ask. I respond, it would be a good sigh if you are not worried by that question.

When something enters an infant's vision he might reach out to it, but often there is nothing to grab, what is reached for may only be an illusion or is further away then his reach or maybe incorporeal like smoke, or a moonbeam. This behavior to me seems an instinct, and there is a like instinct when we perceive something and then attempt to understand it, or grasp it; we reach out to grasp it rationally to define its exact location in our scheme of thought. And as is often the case for infants trying to touch what can't be touched, as they don't yet know what can and can't be touched, sometimes we reach for a rational understanding of somethings only to have what we reached for fade away. The experience is there in Plato, the Greeks before Socrates didn't seem possessed of the instinct to rationally grasp something, at least not to the modern or academic degree. They had these ideas, uncategorized, freely moving through their conversations and their dealings with one another, that is until they meet the Socratic. Socrates, and those like him, was to the Greek world view and our own grasping rational mind is to our individual worlds. Some would respond to Socrates by saying that words they could speak of perfectly well (like virtue) suddenly went numb to them; what was once very real suddenly seemed an illusion like a shadow on a wall. Thinking rationally is perfectly fine in many, externally defined, domains mostly those with a mathematical or exact nature. But other things always seem constantly beyond our rational grasp. As I move on, let me note an unfortunate prejudice that comes from the privileging of rational thinking: much as we tend to think of that which we can (at least in principle) touch as more real then 'the apparent' which we can only see, we privilege what can be grasped rationally as being real and go on to conclude that whatever can't be grasped rationally is at best meaningless or even impossible.

Before I go on, let me be very clear about what I mean by grasping something in a rational way, I even recommend you reread the previous paragraph in the light of this one if you are at all unfamiliar with this particular usage. Rational thinking is categorical. I mean categorical in the Aristotelian sense of accusation, the object of rational thought is accused of having a certain property, and thereby divided from those objects which don't have that property. Once the object has been divided from all other thinkable objects it has been grasped. I have been set on the 'grasping' metaphor because of the definiteness with which we know, even control, the location of that which is in our grasp. Likewise, when we rationally grasp an object we have put it in its precise place within its proper limits that separate it from all other objects with which it could be confused. We have grasped 7 only once we can separate it from all non numbers, and then from all other numbers, and then we can know its exact relation to all other objects that we have grasped.

Somethings are quite problematic to rationally grasp. As a quick and dirty example, the self as consciousness. Every time I try to say exactly what I am like, it seems like I change, even by the act of defining myself, and there is a sneaking suspicion that when I claim something about myself I might be changing my self to be that way instead if describing the way I already was. With language, we often try to become exactly clear about what a word, or better yet a statement means. But to what extent are we discovering the meaning it already had and to what extent are we reshaping its meaning to something graspable. Like when we interpret a text, say that a work means one thing as opposed to another, to what degree are we uncovering underlying properties of the text, and to what extent are we shaving off details and connotations from the text. Again I like the metaphor of grasping, the concepts we grasp at are like a soft soft clay, when we touch clay to determine its exact shape, it deforms to the shape of the hand never giving us its true original shape, so to do objects fit tend to fit to the categories that we apply to them. It is ironic that we only consider something real if it can be grasped, yet when we rationally grasp an object
we only encounter our own sensations of the object, and not the 'thing in itself'.

Our relations to others reflect this. When grabbed, or felt (like a blind man feeling your face) the whole situation takes on an object quality. That which grasps your arm does not seem like another but like an object it the way of your motion, and when you grab is is not a person you hold, but and object with certain texture, firmness, temperature, and shape. Interesting that where the solid grip fails to find another and alienates us completely, the gentlest touch can bring one to an immediate sense of otherness and companionship.

If some objects of rational thought are like soft clay, disturbed by by the gentlest of handling then enlightenment would be like a smoke ring, even to approach it with the intention of grasping it seems enough to make it fade away completely. Is this why reaching for enlightenment frustrates us so, that in trying to grab it we lose sight of it? Even in rare moments where one feels like enlightenment displays herself to us, as soon as we reach to her she hides herself and flees into oblivion, leaving behind only a faint memory bound to evaporate away like the memory of a dream within moments of waking. So maybe we should start by calming our rational instinct, and wait patiently for enlightenment to come to us.

When we rationally grasp an object, we distinguish it from what it isn't. We might say "I know what the object is, so far as I know what is not the object." Rational grasping of concepts is based on this, it is meaningless to say an object has a quality if it is meaningless to say that it doesn't have a quality. Enlightenment is ineffable, but so called enlightenment we may be able to progress on.