The Cavern of Being

“that over against which Being is limited – becoming, seeming, thinking, the ought – is not just something we have thought up. Here, powers are holding sway that bewitch and prevail over beings, their opening up and formation, their closing and deformation”- Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

There is a parallel between the way in which Heidegger insists that it takes serious effort to overcome habits of thought which cover over and render as self evident our being and Being itself, and the Zen focus on just seeing what is real. In a previous essay, I made a suggestion that we should just let things be in the sense of not trying to squash reality into our notions of what should be. That’s something of a paradox itself.

The way Heidegger and certain Zen teachings mean of letting things be is not the nihilistic way, which is nothing more than a turning away or tuning out; nihilism is effortless and comfortable despair. It’s the apathy that fuels inhumanity. Letting things be in Heideggerean terms involves cutting away the strictures of inherited assumptions about the world and ourselves.

Heidegger was working in the ‘western’ philosophical tradition, but he (possibly only anecdotally was he directly inspired by, but he certainly did value and study) read Japanese Zen teachings which had become available and increasingly influential in the west since at least the late 19th century. These teachings probably seemed to Heidegger to confirm his diagnosis that the originary vision at the genesis of Greek philosophy had been played out and worn out in the subsequent millennia of European thought, and that any genuine and worthwhile development had to re-encounter that original spark. Centuries of scholasticism, both in Christian dominated Europe and Buddhist dominated east Asia had made of the sheer originary shock of insight at the heart of all philosophy well trodden and comfortable wagon tracks of custom and presumption. These can deepen the painful somnambulance of unexamined life rather than the opposite.

Letting things be as they are and reveal themselves as they are as expressions of Being as it is takes effort in that for this to happen we have to scrape off all the ingrained assumptions we have been imprinted with and also to restrain our inclinations to impose our own desires to dominate, if only by judging according to our preferences and biases.

None of this is merely something that is relevant only to university philosophy departments, or monasteries, or the intoxicating and/or profiteering of pulp philosophy and self-help gurudom. Being is shocking. Amazing. It is you that reads this and I that writes. It’s is all around, under, internal, external and trancends all of these distinctions, as well as the distinctions imposed through millennia of conditioning tradition. It is right here, right now- and even categories such as these cover up something of it’s weird fire. It may be terrifying to realise that the self-evident is illusory assumption. Heidegger would probably suggest that it should be terrifying. However, it needn’t be. We are already rooted in the real nature of Being.

If it appears deeply unsettling and disorienting to question the reality of the world and self we are used to, that is merely a shaking of a part of consciousness, not so different than the shifting from waking to sleep and visa versa which we go through every day. We are the mystery and the weird fire. We only assume we’re something threatened by the unknown or other because we are conditioned to fear, and the lines of conditioning or causation for this fear are innumerable and probably beyond intelligibility. In any case, they are conditions and the mind that acknowledges it’s conditioned state is the mind at the heart of philosophy, the mind that can – just possibly – transcend conditioning.

Not transcend to another reality. But transcend to this one, this incredible, magnificent, mysterious one- beyond the heavy blunting weight of accepted assumptions, unreflected perceptual habits, the stultifying pain of living according to whatever happen to be the directives of common-sense understanding, and (in our contemporary context) the shifting theatrics of identitarianism which is no more than a self imposed yoke for control by the ruling power(s).