Monthly Archives: May 2016

The linguistic penny drops!

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If you have listened to any talk James has given you will have noticed that he has a very particular way of speaking.
When I first started to edit transcribed recordings I spent some time cutting and pasting and fiddling with the words so that they sounded more normal to my ears. Then I realised that  it no longer sounded like James speaking and that, more importantly,  there is an unusually extreme precision in his use of language…which is not something to fiddle with.

In learning from him, when something is not clear, sometimes I interrupt the flow and ask a direct question but more often it’s either that clarification comes during the course of later conversation or I wait for the penny to eventually drop. When I have a little more clarity myself there may be a lightbulb moment –  mixing my metaphors wildly here.  I think its a sign of good teaching to encourage the stretch to a higher shelf rather than just handing things down. So here’s what was on the shelf…

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In English language lessons we are taught the singular and the plural of many nouns and so i had  a little puzzle because, no matter what the circumstance, although the singular seemed to be called for James always uses the plural – phenomena.

So, some time ago, although fairly sure what his answer would be, I  asked him a question. In the past he has said that one could refer to Noam Chomsky as a bodhisattva of language. and looking at what he, Chomsky, has written about language is a revelation…just a quick look was enough to my eyes water! There is clearly a lot more to communication than the surface construction. So it was unlikely that he doesn’t know the singular…

so i asked… ” you do know that  that the singular of phenomena is phenomenon?” He just smiled and said “yes” and we left there.

For a while the situation was that he continued to say the plural “phenomena” no matter what the context  and i continued to twitch slightly whenever i thought it should be “phenomenon” singular. Maybe its just an anomaly, best ignored … i thought.

Eventually my ‘school trained’ knowledge succumbed to dharma understanding and the penny dropped…there is no such thing as ‘a phenomenon’. The word is suggestive of something discrete and discontinuous – separated out from other phenomena… whereas the experience of phenomena is always plural… each being dependant upon other phenomena for their arising together…kerr-chink!

Using the scissors or ‘biscuit cutters’ to abstract phenomena from the arising field and then reifying them and ascribing value to them are steps in the instructions in the popular “Create your own Samsara” kit. The result is not real but suffering, arising from misapprehension, is woven into its apparent structure because, as there is neither reality to the building blocks nor cement in the mortar, it cannot bear any weight. Not that hopes and fears and expectations have any more weight than other thoughts but there seems to be quite an energetic charge to them…

Whether or not to use this kit is the choice which mediation offers.
To begin with the misapprehension, being habitual, is continuous…and it takes a lot of mediation and examination, slowing things down before we can see what we’re doing. Then, with practice, we can see through  ‘the rabbit/thought hole’ and choose not to go down it.
If we do its like putting our attention into a little vortex where the thought you’ve caught plays around with other thoughts taking our energy into a spin and  the actuality of the spacious, open, astonishing  revelation from which we are never apart is occluded…
but its always there… even when we’re forgetting…just a little release and we’re back home.

‘Human Hubris’ may seem a poncey strapline but it is, i think, applicable to some behaviours in the film The Pearl Button …

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…and i have a fondness for alliteration!

I looked up the word ‘hubris’ when i first came across it a little while ago and thought it a useful word… it means insolence, arrogance, such as invites disaster:overweening… and boy, are humans capable of manifesting this!

‘Cape Horn marks the northern boundary of the Drake Passage and is where the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans collide. For decades it was a major milestone on the clipper route, by which sailing ships carried trade around the world. The waters around Cape Horn are particularly hazardous, owing to strong winds, large waves, strong currents and Icebergs; these dangers have made it notorious as a sailors’ graveyard.’ (wikipedia)1801

So what would current health and safety rules make of a family taking a 12-year-old in a tiny open boat, hollowed from a tree trunk, around Cape Horn?  The native Patagonian with the links back to his pre-Colombian ancestors who was interviewed in this film made the passage twice (the first time when he was 12) yet now, at late middle-age, he’s not allowed…the men with big ships say it’s not safe to for him to do this.
He is one of the remaining few with the knowledge of his ancestors and the ability and desire to use it.
His people were water-people, they knew how to read sea, the winds, the thousand miles or so of shoreline, the weather, and how to navigate by looking at the sky. The younger generation does not have this, those that remember the old days and ways are dying out.

They lived like this from pre-columbian times for thousands of years but in the early 19th century Patagonia was mapped by a British naval officer and later, in exchange for a mother-of-pearl button, one of these people was brought to England, to London for two years…and then returned. Unsurprisingly he was never the same again.

Europeans and Chileans then brought the Patagonians the teachings of Catholicism, put them into school, unwittingly gave them clothing permeated with unknown bacteria (for these naked painted people had to be made decent and covered up) and herded them together, onto an island off the coast.
Their faces in photographs, before and after, said it all…and their numbers were soon decimated.
Later the remaining indigenous people were hunted… money was paid for the testicles and breasts of adults and for the ears of children killed. This made room for proper people to do proper farming and live as people should….well that was the thinking at the time!

Yet the farming is not that successful. The torture (for killing sake, not to extract information…that was already known) and disposal of the victims by helicopter into the sea under the military dictatorship which overthrew the socialist Salvador Allende’s rule (with some help from others…if you are interested you can easily discover who) in the 1970’s is another sorry addition to the story…  under his rule there had been a movement to return land to the indigenous people.

The Guardian’s critic Andrew Pulver says ‘It really is intelligent, magnificent film-making’

If you have time you can see it tonight at the Exeter picture house cinema. I found it  shocking and poignant, with some astonishingly beautiful photography… another, generally unmarked, holocaust.