Fwd: AtD, 839...(St.) Cyprian, Bodhisattva

Sun Apr 13 15:57:56 CDT 2008

I wonder.  I personally find all notions of ultimates and fundamentals a bit dodgy if not downright absurd.  Any implication of the beginning (or end) of eternity or the fundamental nature of the infinite leaves me a little queasy in the gray matter.  Could Thomas the Great think otherwise?  Jung had, well, some issues.  He talked alot about psychological depth, but I have trouble with the idea of seeing him striving to attain or retain any sort of dynamic physical relationship to his psyche.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Philosophy in the Flesh posit mind as fully embodied, as much a part of the big toe, if you will as of the brain.  Physical therapists are fond of noting that "tissues have issues."   If our mind is so physical, notions of soul, spirit, and god as they relate to individuality must reenter our considerations of experience.  The question of intersubjectivity is already hotly enough debated that I think we can all be free
 to draw our conclusions on that question, too.

The point is, if there is any such thing as void, is the human mind capable of embracing it?  To cast the least thought into it casts it into being rather than voidness, no?  And so, too, what One might there be that is not void?  If I suggest there is a One greater than all others, is it one?  Or is it's oneness now voided?  Paradox is elemental to the mystery of life, surely, but to use paradox as a logical dodge is just weak.   I do not think Our Boy is the type to take the simp's way out.  I do believe our dear Mr. Pynchon (has anyone else noticed his name rhymes with San Juan?  How about San Tom de Pynchon?) would have us take a few minutes to think about these things as we enjoy his labyrinthine abysses....

Another thing that comes to mind, from reading Mircea Eliade's The Forge and the Crucible, is the role of the "sexualization of the world" in T.P.s novels.  Eliade notes that at the beginnings of the cultural trends that evolved into alchemy, one of the important trends in the development of the emerging metaphors of being was the role of imputing sexual identities to inanimate forms in nature.  Black metals were rigid and found at the surface, while red metals were soft and found deep in the bowels of the (feminine) Earth. Orgiastic gatherings were a ready part of fertility rituals, and some of the arcane prescriptions for, e.g., grafting trees sound downright fun.  I might have to re-up my arborist certification to get into some of these....

----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at yahoo.ca>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2008 6:51:03 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: AtD, 839...(St.) Cyprian, Bodhisattva

Ian,

  Speaking of the void......................

  I recently read this from a guy named Thomas Moore on Pynchon thru Gravity's Rainbow:;

  "Pynchon seems to share Jung's shy faith in the possibility of an ultimate One such that if you blink at the void, the void can become"...........

  Cyprian: inexact Bodhisattva, saint ala John of The Cross, like Dostoevsky's Idiot or Alyosha
  in Brothers K........a holy fool.................He does seem to be Pynchon's attempt at creating/understanding/limning a person who becomes a good human being, yes?

  Mark

Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at yahoo.ca> wrote:
          For a more complete idea of the bodhisattva vow, check out www.buddhanet.net and look up Avalokitesvara, Ksitigharba, Earth Store Buddha.  All are the same figure with differing attributes.  The idea is that the bodhisattva reaches enlightenment, but out of compassion chooses, instead of entering Nirvana, to return to help alleviate the suffering of those beings caught in samsara.  He vows to return until all sentient beings are liberated from samsara.  What that means superficially is forever, right? because there is no end to samsara.  If samsara were to end there could not logically be any sunyata, there would be nothing.  Only void and that is one of the nihilistic traps westerners fall into, that sunyata is emptiness, as it is commonly translated, or void.  It is not that.  One might vaguely think of it as the dimension in which samsara (the dimension of all things) arises.  It is the absence of inherent characteristics, the ineluctable
 nature of perpetual flux.  

The element of desire is something else, I think.  Desire is the motivating factor that inspires the individual to achieve the enlightenment necessary to become the bodhisattva and wish to return forever in service to sentient beings struggling to achieve enlightenment.  Even the bodhisattva, then, is not without desire.  The main factor of difference in the path to enlightenment is the transcendence beyond attachment to desires.  That may be what our brave author has in mind, but I'm not so sure.  

It might be more appropriate to go looking in St John of the Cross.  This sounds more like the Dark Night of the Soul than like any Buddhist philosophy.  The two are akin in that both refer to transrational states, and might even have Pavlovian correlates, but they are markedly different in their landscapes.  I also think the Dark Night dovetails more neatly with Jungian psychology, which figures broadly in Our Boy's work.  I am looking, too, at elements of the Shadow, both bright and dark aspects, in the characters.  Think here of those things others see in the character that the character himself cannot detect except by tracking symptomologies.  

For more on St. John go to the Catholic Encyclopedia.  Sorry I'm not more tech-savvy to send you all the links, but this way you get the pleasure of the research, right?

  ----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, April 11, 2008 9:09:56 AM
Subject: Fwd: AtD, 839...(St.) Cyprian, Bodhisattva

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  839 "No question of desire....he had not even been imagining desire, its arousal, its fulfillment, any occasion for it": Wikipedia on Bodhisattva: "According to one sutra, the Buddha, after his supreme
 enlightenment, was reluctant to teach others because he thought mankind had too much dust in the eyes and were too obsessed with desires, and did not consider abandoning desires"....

  Cyprian becomes care-givingly maternal, a compassionate boddhisattva-like role: again Wikipedia on Bodhisattva: "Tibetan doctrine (like Theravada, for different reasons) recognizes only the first of these, holding that Buddhas remain in the world for ever, in some sense, able to help others, so there is no point in delay. East Asian doctrinal traditions tend to emphasize the second and/or third, the idea of deliberately refraining from becoming a Buddha, perhaps for ever."

  Misc. (trivia) St. Cyprian's was the prep school Orwell went to.

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