These are the spiritual climes
that try human souls. Everywhere, to attach or not to attach.
Everywhere, another "I think, therefore blah, blah, blah." And of course
we live in the midst of an information explosion that runs in parallel
with ecosystem stress rumblings.
In the solutions realm of changed mindsets, there is a way out of the
polarized worlds of the external and the internal–of science and
psychology/spiritual practices. There is the inter-world of knowledge
formed by actual human entanglements with objects of interest. Three
facets are worth bringing to mind:
1. Each of us is tied very specifically to the outer world by our cares,
interests and knowledge.
2. A world of meaning is formed from all the knowledge entanglements of
individuals, cultures and corporate bodies. This world works as any
ecology where some meanings proliferate, are selected, work in certain
cultural environments and so forth.
3. To acknowledge the active and extensive world of meaning that humans
add to context-defining organisms is to have the choice of leaving the
intolerant and boring cultural realms of various forms of objectivism
for embodied forms of living where transactions of meaning are
care-to-care rather than object versus object.
In Buddhist terms we are our attachments and there are many. But unlike
Buddhism we can choose not to run from our attachments but rather to
frolic in the mental ecology like a Zen gardener.
In Cartesian epistemology terms there are obvious peaks of agreement
where the mental ecology finds just one species of meaning and where
things appear–ohmigod–“objective.” No matter how wild the Zen gardener
in the ecology of meaning it doesn’t preclude a little bending to the
priorities of our interdependence.
Dance, dance ... with my body and with my mind, straight and high until
I die.
