Attending Creation

Simple statements

Out Loud, oil on panel

At every turn Thought has corrupted language.

This seems an outrageous statement. Nonsensical. Language would be impossible outside of thought. Right?

Does it matter? I mean, does it matter that language has to exist within Thought? Not that it doesn’t matter what Thought has done to/with language. Thought exists. And, as it never ceases to amaze, Thought has created the world we find ourselves trapped in. Thought did not create the world. Thought has destroyed the living fabric of creation on this Earth and replaced it with a mental construct, an image in the mind turned into actual conditions. It has done this through a process of binary destruction. Turning every open-ended, abundance of possibility into a “choice” between two polar opposites. As David Bohm would say, “Discussion, whose root is the same as in percussion, or concussion, means to hammer.” We see this as a good thing, “Hammer out the details….”

“If the only tool you have is a hammer….”

We need to always be ready to slow down and examine the momentum that a particular use of language gives, or removes, from our awareness. Most of what I’ve written has ended up being explorations of this condition. Without this restraint and willingness to suspend; judgement, action, agendas; we are trapped in language and pawns to the authoritarianism of Thought.

This suddenly appears obvious. Thought works by establishing authority. Authority starts with the claim, “I thought this!” All that follows is an attempt to manage the play of power unleashed by claiming authority. Authoritarianism just fleshes out the beast.

“Well, what kind of crazy corner are you trying to push us into?” You might ask in frustration. “If language, Thought itself, is just a trap, then what can we do?”

Let me counter by saying, what can we do without looking into these questions? How is the present course on any level going to lead us into anything but a cascade of intertwined and compounding catastrophes? Unless we press on and look for ways out of the trap the results are clear and self-evident. As is the incredible, unbelievable, depths and lengths we as a society; culture, collection of atomized, estranged and broken individuals, mob, mass-audience…; are willing to go to hide all of this from our awareness and insist that maintaining the present course must go on at any and all costs.

This has been the most shocking revelation of this apocalyptic moment. I’ve banged into it often and for this post, I’d like to set it to the side and get back to pulling on the threads of the germ of what is present in the title. A phrase that came to me stating that what we are here to do is to attend to creation. What could this mean?

One of my first significant insights. That is, not something “I thought.” But something that came to me. Was that all we can truly say we have, and have any say in, is our attention and where and how we turn it. Being alive begins with the capacity to attend. Here is where Thought’s push to make us all un-dead begins. Every effort of the Edifice of Thought is aimed at distracting our attention from what it is to be alive and turn our attention into an interior prison. What makes beginning any meditative practice so difficult is that Thought has gone to such elaborate efforts to keep us from looking at, attending to, what Thought does and is, and is not; while keeping us off-balance and lost in precarity so that we have little energy and less interest in challenging its hegemony.

As a reminder, I’d like to clarify that by Thought what I refer to is what Bohm & Krishnamurti defined as the tangle of habit, expectation, reactive feelings, and a particular way of interpreting emotion. Thought is the accumulated psychological baggage we carry about with us. It includes every form of dogma, recognized or not, that takes us out of any possibility of responding to the moment as it arises and keeps us within what I’ve long seen as stereotypical behavior. Thought and creation are antithetical.

The language of power structures and political analysis, words like prison, and hegemony, points to the way that all that we see as a series of possibly intransigent political problems are neither political or problems at their cores. What we see, as with every aspect of the Edifice of Thought are structures Thought has brought about and the only avenues we are aware of are those that Thought has imposed upon us and that only serve Thought.

The entire edifice is built on a series of conflations. We conflate thinking with Thought. We conflate our desperate desire for certainty and the resulting rush to analyze life as a series of problems to which Thought can provide answers and bring us actual security. We fail to see that every attempt to impose a result that does not actually take us out of Thought will only, and always, lead to “unintended consequences” that can only, and will only, lead us into deepening desperation and increasing destruction.

This is where we see the limits of political thought, “We’ll hammer out a solution!”

“We have the answers!”

“They are wrong!”

As with any reduction to a binary the chances are at best 50/50 that we are “right” and they are “wrong.” And in either case acting as if the whole process is not thoroughly bankrupt and that all its so-called potentials totally corrupt is a surrender to fear. We approach risk in a way that thought has imposed on us; that keeps us hemmed in to a series of “possibilities” that are no more than fantasies.

If the losses and sacrifices of all those who preceded us are to have any value we need to take their lessons to heart. Everything that has been “tried” throughout history has failed. None of it will ever work. Giving X, “One more try!” Will only further our descent into the maws of destruction and extinction.

Every statement made, every position held, from a desire to maintain or further an existing agenda is corrupt and can only lead us into more danger. There is no good idea, healthy principle, guiding precept that is immune to this fact.

Even this has been used by Thought to build its power. Those who suspend and wait for clarity have always been steamrolled by the demands of blitzkrieg. Those willing to destroy a village to save a village have always prevailed. Those who have, “Fought back in the name of Freedom!” have always ended up furthering the destruction and providing cover for the corruption at the heart of power.

There is, there has to be, a growing awareness that “Bombing the bad guys!” will always and only ever result in turning those of us opposing bad guys into bad guys and repressing the urges of the un-dead haters and destroyers will only result in their force popping up somewhere, sometime, else.

Attend Creation.

To attend is to allow our attention to turn and remain…, not necessarily focused, but directed, pointed at, something.

What does creation mean?

Thought has refused the primacy of attention and forced it into a role where it is a force that must be distracted. It has done a similar thing with creation. We can hardly avoid the thought that creation implies a creator. A sky-god patriarch, angry and pathetic for all his bluster and fury, who must have created creation and all its creatures.

The moment that arose when Quantum Theory broke through our insistence that cause & effect were simple physical reactions that could be solved for the way a ballistic calculation solves the aiming of a weapon; and revealed the bankruptcy of all the Habits of Thought up until that moment. This crisis of belief was met by the culture at large the same way that Niels Bohr and the other future bomb-makers decided to see it. If the implications of Quantum Mechanics are too daunting, just forget about it and focus on running the numbers. As Tolkien showed us, when presented with the true horrors of the Ring, most will accept its intoxicating allure and insist on grasping it for themselves at whatever cost.

David Bohm, aided and supported by his collaborations with Krishnamurti, never dropped the question and persisted at looking for a way to follow the implications the new Physics had laid bare. His Implicate Order points at a truly radical, addressing the root, cosmology that does not begin and end with wish-fulfillment and self-projection. In the Implicate Order we have a different way of looking at creation, at creatures, at what it is to be alive in this cosmos we find ourselves in.

The risk has remained that in seeking authority and codifying the good we turn Bohm’s insights into a new dogma and let it all get folded back into the Edifice of Thought. There are kernels of a way out of this always fatal mechanism inherent in the Implicate Order as he saw it. As I would say, as it came to him.

If at every moment what is tacit, that is, what is apparent and touchable, present, has unfolded from the implications that arise from the unfolding of the last moment and if this is happening at the tiniest possible dimension of distance and within the shortest possible increment of time, then there is no room for or need of a creator. There is no author. No authority. There are momentums. There is inertia, but unlike in ballistic physics, these are not laws. They are, as Rupert Sheldrake proposed, Habits of Nature.

Creatures, and creation itself, are no longer the objects of a creator who is a projection of an internalized abuser. We can suspend our insistence on authority and refuse our role as perpetuators of abuse.

Clarity is not an imposed certainty. Coherence is not the result of a negotiation or battle for supremacy. Clarity is a characteristic of that which we find to be coherent and coherence is that which we find holds together despite what we may wish to be true. We cannot always see this. We cannot attend equally well at every moment; but we can acknowledge that attending creation is the only way we can break out of the bonds of Thought.

To be a creature among creatures inside of creation is to attend to and align our selves with the forces of life, an unfolding that we can still see around us in the fragments and remnants, the ruins of the Natural World superseded and corroded by the forces of power as they have worked through the habits of Thought.

It came to me the other day that while we create, as in making art, we approach what I’ve always admired about our fellow creatures. We are. We are not trying, not pushing, not establishing, or following, an agenda. We are and we are co-creating a moment that has never been before. One that has within it implications that will help form the next iteration, moving from implicit to tacit.