Now that we've got a better handle on the perpetual displacement of virtual objects and their relation to the (non)-being of questions, I can't resist a tangent extending this idea in another direction.
I was recently listening to a Shinzen Young video where he describes one of his own meditations, rather than giving instructions for students. He talks about half closing his eyes and blurring his vision to induce a strange visual state where the formlessness of the outer visual world meets the inner visual world of ceaselessly projected mental images. He describes the outer visual world as appearing completely abstract, just patches of color and form without objects. And he describes the inner visual world as built from the unconscious "flipping through a mental rolodex of images". I have just enough experience with both of these worlds to have some idea what he's talking about, though I've never had them interact in the way he describes. Perhaps surprisingly, he describes their point of interaction by invoking Platonic Ideals (around minute 17 in the video). He says that something like an Idea structures the space of unconscious mental images and provides for its attachment to the real world, which is otherwise 'unfixated'.
This story should sound remarkably familiar to what we've been trying to describe for weeks now. The only part we might need to clarify is that the "mental rolodex" isn't literally a mnemonic storehouse of photos taken of our actual past experiences. That gives us a great description of the way the mental images seem to just pop into existence out of nowhere with realistic clarity, and to rush past as each one is replaced by the next. But you could equally well interpret this as watching the output of an algorithm for generating mental images, which can then be tied to various actual moments both present and past. Perhaps a bit like watching these faces morph into one another (if you think of this more as a developmental process of generating the faces, rather than reassembling the trajectory from the stills). Interpreted that way, this deep visual space becomes like an unconscious machine for producing various images as linked. The link is the process of production, and exists despite the huge differences in the images produced. Discovering the algorithm that structures an inner visual space enables us to link different images as instances of the same Idea. It's what enables us to name something and it works just like discovering the question that all these images answer to -- in this case the question, "What is a church?" And indeed, right after talking about Plato's Ideas, Young goes straight on to talk about zen koans like, "When you see the flower, how do you experience God?"
So here we're seeing Questions related directly to Ideas thought of as something that structures a whole series of (usually) unconscious visual images. We've come to the same notion of the questioning unconscious we talked about last time from a completely different direction. Pretty interesting coincidence, no?
But wait, there's more!
If we keep driving in this direction, we can start to see how you might want to describe the unconscious as empty. Not-self, emptiness, cessation ... these are the mystical deep end of the meditation swimming pool. I don't claim to fully understand them in the sense of having experienced them routinely. Though I did die this morning, so I got that going for me, which is nice. If we think of the unconscious as an image producing machine, a little desiring machine that's constantly asking what we see and what we want, then we can see right away that it doesn't contain any-thing. Certainly it doesn't contain me or my memories, because we're defining it here as the process by which those are produced. The unconscious questions and never answers. It has the (non)-Being of a question, the ?-Being that we saw Plato should have ascribed to his Ideas. It is, for lack of a better term, empty of Being. It's not nothing exactly. And it certainly isn't the absence of Being, since we've already determined that the being of the question is just different, and only gets converted into negation when we suffer from asking the wrong question. The term "non-dual awareness" takes on a whole new significance in this light -- not-two, not-one, beyond Being and Not-Being.
What's more, Deleuze has given us a whole new set of terms for thinking about this formerly mystical realm. Emptiness is empty of things, but it is full of questions, of Ideas. It's the process of relating things. And a process is characterized by the way it gets hidden behind or disguised in its products. As if it just kept giving birth to new products all the time, each of them a disguise of a disguise of a disguise, with no first unmasked thing to launch this chain, and nothing to hold together the proliferation of progressive mutations than the process itself. This sounds a whole lot like impermanence to me. We also talked a lot about the displacement of the virtual object, which has no identity in itself and is always discovered somewhere other than where it is, perpetually missing from its place and fragmented. This not only conveys some of the same sense of movement as impermanence, but it seems to point to the unsatisfactoriness of every thing. The question is never resolved. It always moves on as you discover you've only answered it in part. You can actually never resolve question, never know all the possible answers, because the progressive specification of the question is nothing more than the unfolding of these spaces of possibility. In short, the disguise and the displacement of the virtual object read almost like the first two characteristics of Being. Together, they point us in the direction of the third -- the (non)-Being of the question.
I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that there could be a relationship between Buddhism and concepts drawn from psychoanalysis. In fact, they were writing about this in the 50's it seems. But in Deleuze's hands, this connection has the potential to become properly metaphysical.
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