A Brief Primer for Meditation
‘What is all this?’
‘Who is it that asks?’
On the scale of the particular, we see that things appear, change and interact, and then disappear. On the scale of the totality, we see that every single thing that can be pointed to as distinct exits in an interrelationship of mutual dependency with everything else. ‘What’ all this (the world) actually is is of absolute integration, such that the particular is itself simply a designation. “A dog” “my toenails” “the beautiful sunset” “subatomic particles”; these are all concrete phenomena.
On the one hand, the distinctions between them are certainly relatively valid given the way our senses and thinking are shaped (as in, according to the existential form of a living sentience acting and negotiating/manipulating it’s environment). However, pursuing lines of causation, or the structures themselves, or the dynamics of their formation and appearance, or the streams of conditionality to the limit of intelligence arrives at barriers beyond which lie at best speculation, or often just unformulatable propositions, inexplicable incoherencies, absolute contradictions, absurdities, unsolvable paradoxes-incomprehensibilities.
The intelligence that perceives and analyses the external world in this way, when directed internally finds other objects for designation- “memories” “desires” “dreams”, “narratives”, even “knowledge, systems, opinions, beliefs”. What it cannot do is grasp itself or find any objective ground for itself. The intellect is a tool for understanding/acting on relative things as objects.
But beyond these relative things and their relationships, and thus beyond the reach of the intellect and discursive thinking, is that which is best indicated by limiting designations and stilling (as far as possible) the desire to designate.
Words like Absolute, or Reality, or Being, Existence, etc have their uses no doubt. Much of really profound, edifying and beautiful art, literature, philosophy, and learning grow around such terms. But at a basic and immediate level, these supra-relatives are always present in the interrogatives;
“who” for the internal.
“what” for the external.
And the two are not separate.