Who is Abhinavagupta? — with Ben Williams, PhD [2021-07-22]

Michael_Stumpf · July 30, 2021, 5:21pm

Sometimes I Feel Neutral to Be the Most Dynamical Place/State to Be,
not a Neutered Place/State; it seems to Be the Capacity for Equanimity without Indifference-not Caring.

This in a way to Embrace the Aliveness of:

Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbour does, and {the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language}. Thus all understanding is always at the same time not-understanding, all concurrence in thought and feeling at the same time a divergence. —HUMBOLDT, On Language

Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being (Toward an Ethics of Attunement) . Penn State University Press. Kindle Edition.

Misunderstanding ; When we think about listening in the ordinary way, we usually (but not always) make a distinction between hearing as the physiological process of perceiving sounds, and understanding as our interpretation of those sounds. Most of us recognize both physical and psychological impediments to hearing—deafness, distraction, self-absorption, denial, and so forth. And most of us think misunderstanding is an impediment to effective communication that interferes with the aim of being a good listener. The perspective offered in this book challenges these perspectives on listening. It challenges the ideas that (a) misunderstanding can be avoided, (b) speaking is at the center of communication, and (c) communication is, at heart, the accurate or inaccurate exchange of messages.

Lipari, Lisbeth. Listening, Thinking, Being (Toward an Ethics of Attunement) . Penn State University Press. Kindle Edition.

EnergyWords

Energy of/in Words & the Receptivity of ;
seems to Be Within the Heart of Life-YES?

madrush · July 31, 2021, 12:29am

I would love to reply to these provocative last few posts in more depth—there is a poignant way, I think, in which Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (which came to mind) captures the paradox of what we’re discussing in terms of language’s power to emanate. In that case, it is poem reflecting on the figures from a lost world—Ancient Greece, the various scenes on the urn—their everlastingness, yet inability ever to change, grow, or transform.

Yet we do. The poet grows old—or doesn’t grow old—and dies. While living, anything is possible, they could yet say anything. In death, their words become, frozen in form, frozen in time, yet with the potential to be animated by living voices, brought (out of death) to life. Thus they continue to ripple through consciousness and culture.

Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ask and ye shall receive. A few weeks ago, I got the idea that I wanted to refresh my memory of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, since this play plays a subversive role in Maía’s novel, See You In Our Dreams, which we are reading in another group. We also have a birthday to celebrate, so it seemed like it would be a fun night out. Unfortunately, all the tickets to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival performances were sold out. I put us on a waiting list, said a quiet prayer, and didn’t give it another thought. Sure enough, last week, a new friend gets in touch, semi out of the blue, to say they have four tickets they can’t use, wondering if we’d be interested.

So off I go to enjoy a feast of Shakespearian language with the family. How many thousands or millions of times has this complex emanation reverberated through (there’s a good preposition) performative reanimation? It has been so long since I read the play, in high school, I barely remember it. I bet it will be like new to me… certainly new to the girls. New and old, old and new. A contact experience? If there is something I know tomorrow, which I did not know before tonight, I will let you all know…

johnnydavis54 · July 31, 2021, 1:40am

I was lucky to play Bottom many years ago. When Bottom comes on stage with a donkey head the kids shriek with joy. And the play within a play in the last act takes slapstick to a new level. It’s easy to imagine Shakespeare must have had access to magic mushrooms. I have no doubt that he was greeted by the Visitors. What I didn’t really understand when I played it, has to do with changes in our current culture, as we have greater rapport with plant medicine, spells and magic, and making contact with intelligences from other dimensions. I played Bottom right at the cusp of the New Age, early 80s, so I imagine current performers would fold those ideas, through the voicebody, both heard and unheard music, the orbs and unidentified flying objects, the strange and intoxicating scents, emanating from the shimmering we are such stuff as dreams are made of waves upon waves which this word-magic floats upon re-echoing down the darkened auditoriums of our subtle collective sensorium. The antidote to the suffering of our difficult times is beauty. Beatrice and Carmen will love it.

“And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name”

madrush · July 31, 2021, 4:20pm

It was a lot of fun, John. The girls were actually laughing and smiling; I was too. It was an an outdoor performance in an amphitheater on the CU Boulder campus, surrounded by large, crenellated, sandstone-colored (Martian red) buildings. Walking through campus, I could imagine Carmen one day walking between these buildings on the way to class. I recalled my own state university, whose institutional architecture could just as well have housed a mental hospital. This had a more magical feel.

It was a modern adaptation, same script but costuming, music, and cultural allusions set in the 80s and 90s. This brought me back to my youth, but wouldn’t have meant as much to the kids. However, the actors were superb. They brought so much kinetic energy and vocal bravado to their parts, it didn’t matter if the words didn’t make total sense. So much is communicated by the body and visual affect. (It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a theatre performance; one forgets what is most salient. It is like being in a dream.)

It had been thundering all evening, wind picking up, swift patchy clouds in a purplish sky. In the middle of the performance, just after the intermission, it began to rain. They paused the performance and everyone huddled inside wearing masks, waiting out the shower. Twenty minutes later, there was only a drizzle, and they resumed. It started raining again soon later (fortunately we had ponchos with us from our emergency stash in the car), but this time the actors kept going to the end. It was a valiant job. They really seemed to be having fun, too.

Earlier in the week, in a private message exchange with an elder peer, I wrote: “Culture is about joy.” Which, when I wrote it, felt not only intuitively but philosophically (essentially) true. Why are doing all this, I thought? Why put up with the slings and arrows, so longsufferingly, lifetime after lifetime? In the back of my mind, I was thinking about ananda, of the Sanskrit triumvirate include sat and chit, variously translated but in my memory as bliss, being, and consciousness, respectively, though I think there are important nuances and emphases lost by this simplistic mapping.

Another way of translating ananda might be as “radiant joy.” Obviously, there are utilitarian aspects to culture, tool-using and know-how, but it seems me the thing that actually keeps it going and makes it worthwhile is the joy. Which is something I know better or more clearly today than I did yesterday. I’ll count that as a win. And the girls had a family adventure, watching Shakespeare in the rain. Bottom, played by a loud, boisterous, bulbous woman and fantastic actor, stole the show. We got semi-lost in the dark, maze-liked, empty (still summer break) campus on the way back to the car in the parking lot, but it didn’t matter. There were puddles to run through, distant rumbles and flashes in the sky, night-lamps reflecting on the walkways, casting long shadows, criss-crossing the stony quad, and the air was sweet and cool.

johnnydavis54 · July 31, 2021, 4:30pm

I will want to quote that line. Culture is a great reason to stay alive. I keep going because of all the good books I have yet to read, all the good music I have yet to hear. And there is always the return to the Bard, who is an endless fountain of immortal drink. And I loved your review…a bit of midsummer madness.

And I wonder if there is a relationship between the play, the rainy weather, and the whereabouts of Abhinavagupta?

Lisa · August 5, 2021, 2:28am

Ben and I had a really great follow-up conversation. I think he recorded it. If not, I seem to have accidentally hit the record button, too, but I’m not sure I got the whole thing. If Ben doesn’t have a link to the recording, get back to me, and I will at least provide my partial recording.

madrush · August 5, 2021, 3:01am

That is good to hear, Lisa! I would love to view or listen to that recording. Do you have a way to upload it? If not, and if the recording is not too large (maybe under 2 GB), you can try uploading it here: Cosmos Cloud. Then I can insert it as an addendum to the original post above…

Lisa · August 5, 2021, 4:48am

Here is the link.

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/78v6PG75FJumcHxTJhn3gOVBmbKpw55DQS5po8rxa2XCSrw_TbrF_YldHMMtQsby.WPc5LopmreeEWK7l Passcode: 35%ULyoT

The passcode must be entered separately: 35%ULyoT

It looks like it is downloadable, so if you want to download it and save it on the Infinite Conversations platform, that would be preferable, as it would then free up my Zoom cloud storage.

Enjoy!

Lisa

johnnydavis54 · August 5, 2021, 4:20pm

Thanks for sharing the conversation, Lisa and Ben, as it makes more explicit some of the tacit knowledge that informed the first episode.

I first heard of Thunder of Perfect Mind in the Gebser talk Lisa gave in NYC a number of years ago. This conversation is a development of that larger conversation. And CEL is perhaps another branch of that tree of knowledge we are all hanging from.

I have a love of the Divine Double archetype which figures so strongly in the Gospel of St. Thomas, which is also mentioned in the dialogue. The image of the Double came to me in a dream state when it was explained to me by a disembodied voice balanced upon a wave of light. I was about ten years old and recall the strong affective tone. I was told explicitly that I was a member of a Double and that we would be re-united at the end of my journey here on earth. I forgot about this episode until I started to study the literature on the Divine Double so popular in the Gnostic period.

Each person is at the center of a vast symbolic network that is unique even as we are each of us influencing others as a unit working 24/7 within a complex technocratic society that is under great stress. Becoming mindful of the power of our metaphorical constructs, as Abhinavagupta was, I am very attracted to the Cosmic Theater metaphor. And who is is zooming who?

And Ben does a great job of asking questions of that Gnostic text and working with subtle differences between Tantra both Buddhist and Shaiva flavors.

Recently, many of us wonder about the Pentagon report to Congress, which has confirmed the presence of strange orbs of light and unidentified objects that appear in ocean and in sky that defy the laws of physics.

Are there inter-dimensional communiques that have been occurring between practitioners working with mystical and artistic dimensions of consciousness and these odd sightings which have been documented and captured on recent video?

How do we move between what is inside/outside, what is language/mind what is past/future? We have another artifact that has been studied with modern tech and has still not given up its secret. A few months ago I found a history of research done on the Shroud of Turin that made me review what I thought I knew. One day with the book I was exploring in my hand I bumped into a man coming out of the park with an image on his T-shirt which I took to be a sign. But a sign of what exactly? Here is that image.

Now that the Pentagon acknowledges that the Military is clueless about what is producing these weird objects my wonder about the physics of what produced this image upon this shroud intensifies. It does appear impossible that this image is a painting on cloth. That theory is false. The image seems to have been delivered by a procedure that our current tech can’t do, nor can our current tech explain it.

Ben mentions how the syntax of radical agency in Tantric Shaivism draws upon an aesthetic dimension in which the body is not left behind but is transmuted. Many have proposed that Jesus was a Tantric master, too. I wonder if there was more going on in the interplay between cultural traditions back then as well as what happened at night between Imaginal forces and subtle bodies in the ancient worlds. And in more recent Grateful Dead concerts that both Ben and Lisa enjoyed, generational transmissions are still happening through music, poetry and shared attentions. Where do these powerful imaginal imprints upon our collective sensorium come from? Can we disentangle from them or maybe refit them in some miraculous way? As our civilization crumbles we may have new myths emerging. Let’s give our attention to this process. We may find we have some wiggle room.

Just some random thoughts generated by the excellent follow up. Thanks!

madrush · August 6, 2021, 12:24am

Thank you for following up with Ben and recording that interesting conversation, Lisa! I am glad you have invoked “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” again. If I remember correctly, you presented on this either in San Francisco or Boulder as part of a Gebser conference I attended—I remember it from then. What a weird, untimely text. I found it most compelling how you and Ben zeroed in on the agentic-dimension of the Whole, as expressed in Tantric Shaivism, as well as this Gnostic text: the I AM who crosses all categories, bursts all binaries, axes all antipodes, all the while poetically self-orchestrating the creative-ontological force field of reality as if it were nothing.

Ben’s remarks (referring to the Grateful Dead, as well as Sanskrit texts) on the importance of understanding context to deepen aesthetic communion was also significant for me, and makes me appreciate the work of devoted scholars like yourselves all the more. “What is the ritual system” he asked, within which a performative enactment of (participation in identity with) an incantation such as “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” would be effective?

Perhaps we cannot know how some of these texts were originally used in communal enchantment. (There is definitely a way they seem to come from the beyond—not only human agency involved). But here are two contexts—let us say, Sacred and Profane—within which we might experience the invocation of Thunder, Perfect Mind in two distinctly modern settings. I found these while looking for examples of the text recited in Coptic, which the first provides beautifully. But isn’t the second video just as true from the meta-perspective of the consciousness embedded in the text?