transience
A fellow I met during my touch-and-go work with the Integral Institute recently spent several weeks on a vipassana retreat. He has a blog, and he has started to write about those weeks.
This article is an attempt at putting words to what I’ve experienced during the course of those six weeks, and will in many ways be quite pointless. The reason I say that is because when one reflects on one’s experience and tries to share some essence of that with another there are at least two assumptions that one makes, which in the Therevadin tradition of Buddhism are not assumed, and are in fact challenged. One is that experience is happening to someone, a self, a person, a being, and the other is that these experiences somehow matter in some grand way.
Good stuff.
… In a well-the-two-things-seem-related-to-me thought … I got a history paper back today. I was looking at I.M. Pei’s Miho Museum in Japan. The paper’s not all that great, but it has a couple of nice moments. I argue that despite Pei’s conscientious handling of the Miho with respect to its beautiful site in a mountain nature preserve, he nonetheless falls victim to a tacit cultural assumption: namely, that man is of a different class of existence than the rest of the world, that he is separate from nature.
Modern architecture tends to be enamoured of nature but rather than consciously interacting with it, it puts nature on display, treating it much as it might a work of art. Some of what Pei has said suggests that he’s aware of this, but his own work is — to me — still crippled by the romantic idealization of man (and hence the built environment) as a monologic* actor on nature’s stage, an aberration in the midst of perfection.
Nah-ah: there is no ontological distinction between skyscrapers and sunsets. It’s all of whole cloth, but we treat ourselves as if we occupy a special place in the universe. We may feel guilty about it to feel better about it, but it’s that false categorization that’s the problem to begin with. This is much the same attitude we had in the pre-Copernican days, when the Earth was the center of all there is. Those who think evolution is “done” (or never happened) are similarly stuck in an self-absorbed rut.
And one might draw a parallel with Vince’s assumption of self as subject to experience.
The Cradle-to-Cradle guys (William McDonough and Michael Braungart) suggest a way out of this (uh, in terms of architecture, anyway), by integrating the built environment with the cycles of ecology. Death is as primary as birth in reality, and the “C2C” paradigm embraces that. One might be tempted say that C2C is sort of a projection of Buddhist ideas onto the concerns of the built environment. What I say in my paper (ie, the whole point of this tirade) is:
A different view is beginning to emerge in which skyscrapers are seen not as man-made objects so much as temporary structures that borrow their material from the ecology. Buildings may begin to be compared to organisms, in that both are are built from their environment and will surrender their materials back to the environment when their lifetime has passed. The result of this shift in view is a better understanding of how the built environment can fit into the cycles of the ecology without deranging or destroying them. Materials and energy flow through structures, living or not, and are returned to the environment as “food†for other structures. The built environment is no longer conceptually or physically separate from its context. It is of it, a transient loop of energy and material which happens to take the form of a building. There is no such thing as “unnatural†in this view. Indeed, there never was any such thing as unnatural: every skyscraper and organism must eventually surrender to its enveloping cycles, one way or another. The newly evolving view merely embraces this fact, to the advantage of all.
I added the bolding. I’m not actually well-enough versed in Buddhist thought to speak intelligently about it. But I gather that the acceptance of impermanence is a freeing thing. The idea of form as a transient loop of emptiness emerging out of emptiness and returning to emptiness. Something like that.
The intellectualization of all of this is of course a different beast than the experience — or maybe embodiment is a better word than experience — of it.
*And often monological; cf Ken Wilber. =)
November 16th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
This is an interesting post… I would probably approach the whole question of man and nature from another perspective, that of perspectives themselves. Let’s take the basic 1st, 2nd, & 3rd person perspectives, and in my post which you linked to it must be stated that I was purposely privileging the 3rd person perspective on reality as objects which arise and pass away, and indeed the subject of those objects also arises and passes from this vantage point. The 1st person perspective would look much different, as there is a subject, which transcends (but is not different from) all objects. All objects arise INside this awareness. What I’m less familiar with is the 2nd person relationship to the Ultimate, that’s just not my personal bent, but it interests me nonetheless.
So back to what you were saying. The way I would re-phrase what you seem to be saying is that man has privileged a 3rd person perspective on nature, seeing “it” as an object to be aware of and to put “on display” as you put it, rather then another subject to relate with intimately and to perhaps even commune with (2nd person) or unite with (1st person). As a friend and I were discussing just a few hours ago, our Western heritage is one of privileging 3rd person perspective. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t some validity to 3rd person perspectives or that we need to demonize it and make it the problem (making an “it” out of “it” is just perpetuating that perspective in any case). The lack of ability or willingness to take multiple perspectives is what really needs to change (which in a different way of putting it, is what I hear you getting at in any case). The reason I would re-phrase it this way, is because if we make the mistake of abandoning the 3rd person, and privileging instead another, then often what happens is we ironically don’t actually see the problem and instead use what we know (a 3rd person view) to fight against itself. Notice that your paper is itself a 3rd person narrative and analysis of a lack of 1st and 2nd person perspectives. Often what I’ve seen happen is this very thing. One argues using a 3rd person voice and perspective that this perspective is harmful. It ends up becoming an infinite regress of defensive & fragmented views. Now to use this very argument against myself, this comment is itself a 3rd person narrative. So what would it look like for me to switch to a 2nd person narrative? Hmm, let’s experiment.
You and I seem to agree on something here. That there is something missing in our relationship to nature. This causes me, and I’m guessing you, a lot of pain. How painful it is to treat precious manifestation as mere objects. We surely need to look at it different, so we can minimize this pain for both ourselves and for the sentient life forms, the actual subjective beings that we are always so deeply connected with. Let’s go out and touch nature with our Hearts, feel into the manifest world with as much sincerity as we possess and then share the beauty of that with the world!
Thanks for listening to my rant, and also thanks for sharing this beautiful blog with me… I look forward to coming back often.
November 16th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
It also has to be mentioned that I understand that you were probably writing in 3rd person, cause that’s basically all that’s acceptable in academia, and this was an academic paper.
It also has to be mentioned that I didn’t explicitly deal with the question of depth in my comment, which makes the whole issue much more complicated.
Alright, that’s enough from me. Good to see you again Eric… Just remembered who you were, and that we knew each other in meatspace… Ha Ha Ha.
November 16th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Wonderful stuff. I can’t really join in beyond adding an anecdotal perspective. More than once I have observed the “natural” world reaching to me as an activity as I might reach to caress my cat. I fancy that I am including the cat as a member of my sentient world when I pet her, and so when nature reached to pet me, I felt included in the awareness of nature as kindred; I felt acknowledged and loved. The point is that I observed nature doing that which we routinely reserve for ourselves, performing the role of subject to me as object. It reminds me of the “animated nature” of fairy tales and mythology. The difference for me being that my experience (if I may use the word) was a living impossible interactive involvement rather than a thought I was having.