Turning words
‘“Turning words” are expressions that turn one to realization’ (Aitken 1991, 24) – whether spoken with that intention or not. Somehow they overcome the inertia that keeps you moving in the same...
View ArticleHigher than existence
The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places people reject and so is like the Tao. — Tao Te Ching 8 (Feng/English) The same text...
View ArticleStigmata
According to the Liddell and Scott lexicon, the word σημεῖον (the usual Greek word for sign and root of semeiotic) was also used by Aristotle for a mathematical point, or a point in time. In this sense...
View ArticleDescription
Can one describe, as if seeing it from above, something within which we are contained, of which we are part, and from which we cannot exit? — Eco (1998, 20) The actual world cannot be distinguished...
View Articlere:Marks
The end of a path is where it points, the point where it ends. Stops are punctuation marks (Latin punctum, a prick, point or spot). What is a period? A full stop, or a space of time? It comes from the...
View ArticleDewdrop
A seed, as ‘an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth’ (Chapter 18), is a symbol of the Point. Another is the dewdrop, as for instance in Yeats: All things hang like a drop of dew Upon a blade...
View ArticlePhenoscopy 5
All things and all phenomena are just one mind; nothing is excluded or unrelated. — Dogen, ‘Bendowa’ (Tanahashi 2010, 15) Everthing is related to everything else. More or less. All right. But do you...
View ArticleA single total experience
There is only one phaneron, and there is no difference between this and the experience of this. In its Firstness, the buddha-nature is the buddha. All buddhas are realization; thus all things are...
View ArticleOne thought
How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop! — Bahá’u’lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶107 Wan-sung says: ‘The moment one particle...
View ArticleA thought
I never actually collect together, or call up simultaneously, all the primary thoughts which contribute to my perception or to my present conviction. — Merleau-Ponty 1945, 71) No particular thought...
View ArticleThe turn that can be expressed
Upon ‘discovering the principle of all things in the point of a moment of thought’ (Avatamsaka Sutra, Cleary 1984, 1163), the universe is a single turning. How is it when it is expressed completely in...
View ArticleEye and I
Someone else is speaking with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart. — Bob Dylan, ‘I and I’ (1983) One’s distraction is another’s revelation. The Eye sees more than the Heart knows. — Blake,...
View ArticleOutsight unseen
When He Himself reveals Himself, Brahma brings into manifestation That which can never be seen. As the seed is in the plant, as the shade is in the tree, as the void is in the sky, as infinite forms...
View ArticlePeircing Dogen
Dogen’s Genjokoan (‘Actualizing the Fundamental Point’) is Peirce’s phaneron. It contains past and present, the three worlds, the ten directions, delusions, enlightenment, all buddhas, sentient beings,...
View ArticleMediately present
Every mind which passes from doubt to belief must have ideas which follow after one another in time. Every mind which reasons must have ideas which not only follow after others but are caused by them....
View ArticleStopping point
How do we get to the point in the empirical sciences? Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to...
View ArticleUncountable
When one bit of dust is raised, it includes the great earth; when one flower opens, the whole world is aroused. When a single moment of thinking is dropped away, the eighty-four thousand afflicting...
View ArticleA prayer for darklings
O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees, of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour’s time, O Loud! That they take no chill. That they do ming no merder. That they shall not gomeet...
View ArticleSowing do drops
Prayers plow not! Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not! — Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 9
View ArticlePhenomenal
‘A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house,’ said Jesus (Matthew 13:57). And as Peirce said, ‘so it is also with phenomena’: ‘most of us seem to find it difficult...
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