Author: Meng-hu

In American poet Mary Sarton’s A Private Mythology is a little collection of poems under the header “The Animal World.” She relates, in the poem “Death and the Turtle” the waning of a little pet turtle, for which she could do nothing. When it died in her hand, her “heart cracked for the brother creature” and it set off a chain of emotional thoughts about death.

So this was it, the universal grief:
Each bears his own end knit up in the bone.
Where are the dead? we ask, as we hurtle
Toward the dark, part of this strange creation,
One with each limpet, leaf, and smallest turtle —
Cry out for life, cry out in desperation!

The poet concludes expressing a perennial lament that never receives adequate reply. Who will remember us when we are dead? We remember the one who has died before us, but the one who witnesses today will tomorrow also be gone. And if we feel this blow reflecting on the death of a little creature whom no one else will remember, what about ourselves when we are forgotten?

Is death simply a matter of not being remembered? Is that the sting? Even religious believers are plased that God remembers them, that God takes care of the flowers in the field and the birds in the air — and by extension, us.

But we know from life itself, that undeniable existential condition, that we take death as a blow, that we are never fully reconciled, even the believer who, after all, grieves, if only for himself, selfishly or otherwise.

Consciousness and memory and a deep knit feeling in the bones that trembles at the whiff of decline. We have taught ourselves that in this consciousness we are alone, but science now shows that animals, too, are conscious of decline and death among their fellows and probably themselves. The universe has its austerity, its coldness. We can never think our way out of this realization. Ascribing it to a divine plan, to a universal way, does not assuage the heart.

We can feel our way out of death through belief, but our necessary task is to feel our way not out of death but into it and through it. We need to feel that death is as bound to life as life is as inexorably a trajectory to death. Many perennial thinkers, religious, philosophical, and secular, have recommended that we study death and little else, that we begin by withdrawing from what distracts us from this task, and meditate upon it day and night.

At the same time, dwelling upon it, we can enrich the subject by bringing life into it, that is, by surrounding ourselves with nature. We do not need to be philosophers or metaphysicians in order to comprehend death. Comprehending suggests reasoning, grasping a reply or getting hold of something. If we appreciate the cycles in our gardens, among the trees, in the forests, and among the animals that quietly and innocently inhabit the natural world, then we can realize that death is bound up in life, that everything that gives life, that enhances life, that we seize upon as celebratory of life, is in fact bound up with death — the death of some plant or animal, the destruction of some sacred part of nature that we will learn to regret, to lament, for what we have excessively taken.

The lesson will slowly occupy our consciousness and give us an ethic that is bound to universals and not derived from society and book-learning. Take what you are willing to give back, if only in another form. Take life, but only with the understanding that you must give it back. Take food (but not animals), clothing, shelter, fuel, but take them abstemiously, gently, reflectively, and only if you are willing to give them back in some form by replacing them, literally, or by giving to one who can. And take love, friendship, companionship, in the same way.

That is the lesson not of life and death but of solitude.

When we are too bound up in life and too weighed down by death, we cannot take perspective. Only in solitude do we learn to begin to “de-become,” as Meister Eckhart put it, to stop clinging, as Buddhists put it. We don’t own anything, and we cannot claim that we are owed something in return for accepting life, so we will suffer when we insist too much. Meanwhile, our appreciation of everything in life magnifies when we acknowledge transience. Not only is every moment richer but we intensify our intention to make it unique — because it is.

The hidden nature of music was speculated upon by Pythagoras as the Harmony of the Spheres, and Boethius in De Musica as musica universalis. Music was by them considered revelatory, an external manifestation of deeper order or governing principle — not so much governing as harmonizing, balancing. Boethius also considered that the principle resided within the body, explaining its autonomic function; the third form of music was the external or gross form created by instruments and voices.

Schopenhauer designed principles of aesthetics but concluded that music transcended all tactile representations such as architecture and painting.

Music stands alone, detached from all the other arts. In music one does not recognize the imitation or reproduction of any Idea of the creatures in the world. Yet music is a great and glorious art, the effect on man’s inmost nature is so powerful, and so completely and so deeply understood by him in his inmost consciousness as a perfectly universal language whole clarity surpasses even that of the perceptible world itself.

To surpass the perceptible world means to surpass the copies of the Ideas which surround us. For Schopenhauer, music is not a copy of anything but the will itself. While objects in the world are perceptible, and suggest universals, music is not of the perceptible world but of the universal world, and is greater than any art than merely suggests the universal. Of course, music is perceived by our sense of hearing, but how can these sounds move our emotions, mere sounds? Schopenhauer was thinking of the music of his day (he mentions Haydn and Rossini), but has clear intimations that music is more than the emotions provoked, and more than arithmetic as Leibnitz suggested. “Music is the unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing.”

In his classic The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto notes that music can give expression to the deepest feelings of the mind, though music falls short of expressing “the holy,” arguing that only silence can approach the holy, the numinous. Otto sees the suggestive in music of religious settings of Bach, Mendelssohn or Thomas Luiz as approximating an inkling of the numinous. But even Confucius understood “the power of music on the mind in a way we moderns cannot better, and touches upon just those elements which we also must recognize in the experience of music.” Otto does refer to the fact that even primitive peoples reacted to music with great enthusiasm, incorporating their basic sounds into their rituals.

This comment of Otto suggests the direction of how music today can be understood as universal, using physics. This is the science of cymatics, which identifies the frequencies of vibration of the standard tones or sounds, especially those assigned within the twelve tones familiar in Western music. Cymatics, pioneered by Swiss scientist Hans Jenny, originally intended to identify and correlate vibrations or frequencies with the multidimensional forms it created with given materials (such as sand or water), but it was quickly realized that not only does sound creates forms, but that knowledge of the nature of sound (frequencies) can anticipate the nature of form. Cymatics can then posit a relationship between all given forms and specific frequencies — even postulating that all objects in the universe are (or were) created by sound.

In The Silent Pulse, George Leonard notes that “Our ability to have a world depends on our ability to entrain with it.” By entrain Leonard and other writers mean that the physical rhythms and pulses of nature and the universe affect everything, including human biological systems, and that successful or optimal human activity is best expressed by conforming to, cooperating with, and harmonizing with these grand pulses. Mitchel Gaynor elaborates (in his Sounds of Healing):

Our ability to entrain or experience our harmony with the vibrations of those around us allows us to feel our connection with the world. Without entrainment — the basis of all communication — we would exist in isolation rather than in harmony with the universe.

Gaynor defines entrainment as the “synchronous influence of one energy system on another.” Cymatics offers the scientific method for verifying the existence of such relationships.

Plainly, “communication-with” refers not simply to communication between human beings but with all living and inanimate beings, the entire universe. Indeed, the disharmony between human beings exists not only because of social and cultural factors but because of the more profound or fundamental fact of human alienation from nature and the true ground of human existence, which is not society but the larger panoply of the universe.

With regards to music, sound can reflect the frequencies of all of the bodily functions, and those organs and functions not following their assessed pattern can, according to music therapists, be restored to balance by being calibrated to their original frequency with the assistance of music or sound that does vibrate at the prescribed (or discovered) frequencies.

Cymatics give music a healing potential. Yet an entire store of healing lore or tradition has always existed in Eastern thought, specifically in primordial syllables such as OM, sound harmonization of the chakras, and use of vibrational sound from bowls as harmonization promoting healing. But even in the Western world, chant has always had a regularizing function, explaining its central place in the history of religious music. Gaynor suggests that certain works of classical music have a healing potential as well — perhaps not as literal as spinning anything of Mozart and Beethoven. Seeking out the emotional character of a musical work can promote a certain “unscientific” aesthetic resonance. Though some decades old, the whole pursuit of music therapy is such a valuable potential that it needs greater popularization.

Much of the healing work of sound, however, is easily acquired when turning to the outside world, the natural world. With the sound of wind in tall pines, of bird song, of moving water and raindrops. the self returns to its primordial home, and every cell becomes attuned to its original tonality.

In a perceptive article titled “Merton’s Margin,” Maciej Bielawski identifies the grand paradox of Thomas Merton’s life, ensconced within the monastery within the Catholic Church, established as its mouthpiece or, at least, its informal and unofficial representative, defender of its institutions and traditions, while ever struggling to assert his own voice. Merton was always drawn to the polis, while acutely, even painfully, aware of the wilderness behind him, its freedom and autonomy, its space, always luring him. And yet Merton was never fully within the polis, the world, nor fully in the wilderness, while nevertheless speaking to or on behalf of both. Merton was always at the margin.

Bielawski describes marginality as resulting “from the sense of non-meaningfulness and lack of sense; it is the consequence of being brushed by death.” In Merton’s case, he lost faith in the world, in secular society, and discovered the possibility of monasticism in an age when hope, in a new post-World War West, encouraged a revival of not mere faith but of devotion in a generation of young intellectuals. This Merton embraced. But the sacrifice did not absorb or take into account his restless need for construction of self and purpose. There was not time. Instead, having decided on his path, he immediately began to chafe at the possibility of a wrong decision, and so he began to travel, restlessly, rebelliously, to the margins of whatever confined him. Bielawski puts it thus:

A worldly person becomes a monk, a monk becomes a writer, a writer becomes a hermit, a hermit becomes a lover and a traveller … Merton was stubbornly and instinctively moving away to the margin of everything that had at first seemed significant to him. He was doing so in the belief that he is searching for an absolute, unquestionable centre.

This tension makes the gifted writer like Merton a poignant searcher, an engaging autobiographer of the soul. Sometimes he is so intimate in his confessions and prayers that he seems saturated in unwavering faith, asking only for more. And yet having moved (and moved readers with him) to that point, Merton abruptly but subtly shifts and heads into the wilderness, the insecure, the margin.

Merton had touched upon the center, the Absolute, in his devotional life, or had he? As a reflex, he coils back from supposed light and seeks out darkness, death, ambiguity, at least in his private writings and in his hard dealings with monastic life. At the meaningless periphery or margin, Merton discovers or conjures a new center, a new angle on the Absolute, and wants to shift his life and mind from externals to that margin. More specifically, Merton wanted to station himself, like the artist, writer, or sage, to a margin that exempts him from complicity in society, the Church, monasticism, to speak purely, openly, and with wisdom. Bielawski compares Merton’s stance to those of classic writers: Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Kafka.

But he was destined not to stay there for long, for new margins, more attractive because newer, more isolating, like temptations to Saint Antony, rear their heads. Merton deftly negotiates his way out of all of them, all the way up to the absurd end.

Merton argues that God’s call to a person already summons that person to the margin of their previous existence. There, on the margin, faith is built or reconstructed. A new center is created. But even this margin, once it becomes a comfortable center, and its faith a comfortable faith, can be false. Conversion (the first call to the margin) cannot endure doubts, and the new struggle undermines the past, and requires purification. The centrality of God has moved to a new place, and the person is bereft of past centralities, past comforts. Now there are only new uncertainties. One must explore anew the meaning of life, existence, God’s purpose, what it means to live between the world and wilderness, between center and margin. Merton skirted along the fine border that exposed the Church and monasticism and theology as falseness, and eked out a persona that only revealed itself after his death.

Bielawski quotes Merton:

We are not justified by any action of our own, but we are called by the voice of God, by the voice of that ultimate being, to pierce through the irrelevance of out life, while accepting and admitting that our life is totally irrelevant, in order to find relevance in Him. … The kind of life that I represent is a life that is openness to gift; gift from God and gift from others.

Merton realized that his marginality, while leading him to different feelings and experiences, had no logic or rationale of its own. He lived dangerously, but not in the intellectual or even individual sense had he been a layperson. But then he would not have had or shred his many insights. Merton brought monasticism and eremitism to popular audiences and rehabilitated his religion’s spirituality. For himself, Merton required the margins in order to be honest. He gloried in the prospect that other people — but really referring to himself — would ever dare

to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.

The term “eidetic” refers, in psychology, to the extraordinary clarity or sharpness of vision retained in the mind, whether referring to images or mental constructs. Thus, eidetic memory is considered photographic in its clarity, and a mental skill in its conceptualization. Alan Watts extends the term to great import in his book Tao The Watercourse Way.

Watts considers the manner of expression in classic texts such as the I Ching, which today is often dismissed as a divination device, much like the tarot. However, the manner of expression in the I Ching is intended not to forecast the future in some gross way but to conjure images appropriate for the reader to take into account when pondering a decision with import on the future. This is a very different interpretation than modern skeptics, and not only richer but closer to the probable understanding of the contemporary compilers of the I Ching (and similar “divination” devices).

Watts presents a hexagram, the textual judgment and the textual image — but the particular hexagram does not even matter, for each is constructed in the same way. What is important is the manner of communication, the intuition evoked by the compiler, and the consciousness of the reader in being attuned to the ways of nature and life, in short, the Tao. Watts notes of the hexagram and accompanying text:

The comment is invariably oracular, vague, and ambivalent, but a person taking it seriously will use it like a Rorschach blot and project into it, from his “unconscious,” whatever there is in him to find in it. This is surely a way of allowing oneself to thinking without keeping a tight guard on one’s thoughts, whether logical or moral. The same sort of process is at work in the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams and in eidetic vision, whereby we descry faces, forms, and pictures in the grain of wood or marble, or in the shapes of clouds.

Here there is no logical barrier to protect an iconic view of reason or logic or tradition or definition of power. Rather, the subjective insight of the viewer or reader is specifically evoked in order to engage the person into participation with surroundings, environment, mental disposition, atunement to self and moods, emotions, and spaces where needs or fears may dwell. It is in this sense that Watts means neither logic nor morals should obstruct self-examination, for logic and morals will emerge from the interpretation of the environment and nature.

This sense of eidetic vision is what links all art and philosophy with self. One looks at a work of art or reads philosophical investigation or deliberation and at first may dismiss them as ink blots, as torpidly designed nonsense. That is logic speaking (initially). Delving further into the work of art or philosophy we can discern patterns that either resonate within us, confirming a direction of thought, or give us an inkling of danger or subterfuge, of being misled.

What is the touchstone for how we interpret the inkblot? The touchstone is whether our interpretation, built of intuition, emotion, and well-being, conjoins with nature and a more powerful and overarching engagement with our immediate environment emerges, and ultimately engages with nature and the universe. Falling short of this, perhaps we appreciate the artist’s or thinker’s efforts, bold but short, interesting but insufficient, sincere but not adequate to the depth of our need for insight. If that is the way with art and creativity, how rich our eidetic vision must be that it can encompass so much and syncretically build a relationship with the universe.

Thus Watts argues that the oracles of the I Ching are the predecessors of the artist’s ink or paints on a canvas in the most primitive sense of offering “forms to be contemplated absentmindedly until the hidden meaning reveals itself, in accordance with one’s own unconscious tendencies.” Eidetic vision means that we apply ourselves, with effort, to discern a meaning or a relevancy, an import, to not only a work of art or thought, but to nature itself. We can gather a great deal of information but we are often left with a hexagram-like fragment bidding us to say “yes” or “no.” This is neither superstition nor science, for neither seems to govern.

Rather, we are left with wu-wei, with non-action, as the wisest course, the watercourse way of the Tao. The course of non-action is not paralysis, indifference, or indolence but wise discernment always attentive to the mutually arising forces before us. This is the course of the solitary, the method of the solitary. It redefines eidetic vision as the application of clarity to the objects, images, and forces around us.

One of the essential differences between East and West is the issue of principle or foundation.

The West argues in terms of law. Right (as in good and evil, right and wrong) is the fundamental principle, and its scriptural religions have been established on this paradigm. The proliferation of laws, whether they be called commandments or precepts or admonitions. are juxtaposed to sin, evil, immorality, and by extension into the secular realm where they become crimes. The definitions and descriptions are necessarily specific and inexorable, with mitigating circumstances or other logical argument the only recourse.

The expression of law in the West is an expression of societal character. If the psychology of a given culture reaches a pitch of determinism in terms of war, acquisitions, belligerence, and expansion, then its laws will be evolve to accommodate these characteristics. Laws are a product of society, and by their nature reveal the values and strengths and weaknesses of the given society. Laws merely cap what already exists.

The necessity for law emerges with the evolution of institutions. No state, king, army, or government can do without written codes that provide parameters to subjects or, politely, “citizens.” Laws are not intended to curb power except in those who would challenge conquerors, rulers, or power-holders. In antiquity, laws would provide cohesion to the tribal and social ambitions of given peoples, and evolve to channel the excess energies of society. Successful enforcement of laws always requires tolerating, even fostering, a range of space for innocuous self-expression on the part of society. Too rigid, and laws provoke resentment; too loose and laws provoke excessive curiosity into the legitimacy of power.

The historical East proceeded differently. In Chinese culture, for example, from Confucius to Taoism and beyond, the foundation of social order is jen, variously (and imperfectly) translated as moral virtue, sentiment, dignity, or even compassion. Society becomes an expression of values that promote a mutual social ordering based on harmony and compassion, insofar as rulers and the governing permit. The occasional despotic decrees of emperors was clearly distinguishable from the social and psychological character of the society. The initial premise was the necessity to promote the well-being of the family, the village, the community, not artificially but organically, through work with nature and the natural patterns of life to which society conformed.

Social evolution in Chinese thought was, thus, based on an ideal state and the notion that society devolved over time. What was natural and unspoken came to be named and described, and when these values were named they became artificial, arbitrary, and subject to abuse. Thus, Lao-tzu:

When the great Tao was lost,
there followed ideas of humanity and justice.
When knowledge and cleverness followed,
there came great deceptions.
When family relations fell out of harmony,
there followed ideas of good parents and loyal children.
When the nation fell into disorder and misrule,
there followed ideas of loyalty and patriotism.

Western society does not, nor ever did historically, attempt to conform to natural patterns of life and expression from its abstract or real origins. It did not perceive the hardening and artificiality of its evolved institutions as impoverishment and decline but as growth and order. It did not see the social results of its top-heavy governance, the results a necessary expedient for the triumph of law and necessity.

Further, nature was, to the Western mind, disorder, chaos, and obstacle, a view that underlies the Old Testament and its juridical conception of God. The aftermath of the New Testament reasserted this Judaic principle as well, wherein “right” was extended from membership in a tribe to membership in an institution — the latter an artificial construct rather than a natural evolution, being based on the predecessor religion’s structure. Law circumscribed to a tribe was extrapolated to become law governing the sectarian members of an institution. Law from Old to New and beyond became not so much moral law as societal psychology. The breakthrough of some Christians as saints, hermits, mystics, or critics of the inexorable law always perceived the problem: the foundation in right rather than the foundation in nature or compassion.

(The project of Jesus was absorbed by the system that imitated the Judaic structure of priesthood and tribalism, and while a different ethic appears here and there in the New Testament, this alternative is effectively displaced by a new system of institutionalism based on law.)

Understanding the dichotomy of East and West (at least the East prior to Western encounter) reveals a new foundational principle for society. The ancient Huainan-tzi, a grand Taoist tract on government and sage-rulers, notes that in an ideal society there are no hermits. But there were certainly hermits in ancient China and throughout the East — because society was not perfect. There were even more varieties of hermits in the West over the centuries, and for the same reasons: that society and the world were chaotic and failing to find foundations, first principles. Going to the heart of eremitism reveals the heart of virtue capable in anyone who recognizes the failings of society and the need for recreating the self in the modern world.

Jung’s psychological writings always touch upon solitude because solitude is the ontological situation of each human being. Consciousness separates us from each other and from all extent beings, which is physically always the case but takes on a new poignancy with consciousness.

Jung’s contribution in identifying the reservoir of motives and limitations in the unconscious, and the historical pool of motives and archetypes in the universal unconscious, opened an entirely fresh look at epistemology.

While science represents the spirit of the times (zeitgeist), Jung argued that the humanities represent the spirit of the depths within all of us, collectively and individually, and that the investigation of these depths represented a rebirth for the individually. This understanding underlies Jung’s entire work, his very mission a reversal of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra — not for Jung to deny the death of God but to announce the birth of a method of understanding the depths.

The psychology of the individual is the psychology of the culture, and while Nietzsche influenced Jung in identifying this cultural foundation of thinking, Jung saw that the exhaustion of the age was a signal that a new direction outside of the purely philosophical or rational discourse must be pursued.

Only the transformation of the attitude of the individual can bring about cultural renewal, said Jung. A deep subliminal connection exists between events and individual psychology. The content of the collective unconscious is the repository of the connection and its objects: myths, images, powers, dominants. Where Schiller had posited a reconciliation of the rational and irrational in higher art, and Nietzsche had rejected reconciliation (of Apollonian and Dionysian) for the will, Jung foresaw reconciliation in the depths, in symbol, and in comprehending the content of the unconscious, and applying it to life and thought.

Jung is persuasive when he argues that the content of the unconscious can not only alert us to but inform of the nature of cultural events. This, at least, was his own experience, when dreams of violence and chaos preceded World War I. He thought he was going mad, but realized with the outbreak of war in 1914 that the troublesome dreams originated in “the subsoil of the collective unconscious.” This is a simple non-rational hunch, a premonition lacking data, but it is a moral inkling that can be the beginning of a more comprehensive linkage of self and world.

All non-rational images, Jung argued further, arise from the soul or self, and express themselves as cultural phenomenon. If a society ignores, suppresses, or destroys this content, the content will re-emerge, malevolently and in distorted fashion, as violence, aggression, and war. The suppression of non-rational images such as art, philosophy, religion, or even licentiousness (leaving unmasked and unexplored those primordial instincts) can lead to mutilated forms later, in the individual and in the society.

Jung introduced an alternative to what society had done or does in addressing subconscious images: he introduced a new psychology, in short, and afforded the individual the opportunity to construct a personal mythology, a psychology that would restore the images, symbols, rituals, and processes to proper function and experience. This allows the individual to reconnect to the primordial sustenance while being able to distinguish the self from the culture and society that is around one. All religious traditions had made this distinction between large and small self, between Self and I. In Psychological Types (1921), Jung wrote:

In as much as the I is only the center of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely complex among other complexes. Hence I discriminate between the I and the self, since the I is only the subject of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my totality: hence it also includes the unconscious psyche. In this sense the self would be an [ideal] greatness which embraces and includes the I. In unconscious fantasy the self often appears as the super-ordinated or ideal personality, as Faust in relation to Goethe and Zarathustra to Nietzsche.

The realization of the complexity of the individual leads idealized personas or, more logically and humbly, to solitude. Solitude is not here a condition of study or research but necessarily separates the seer from the world. When Jung constructed a primitive tower on the Swiss shores of Lake Zurich in 1920, he reflected that the tower was a solitary symbol of self. “I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages — within myself,” he wrote, for the Middle Ages seemed to express the subconscious more openly in society than in the modern age. Here, essentially, was an obvious symbol of solitude.

And to the theologian Richard Wilhelm, Jung wrote candidly:

Why are there no worldly cloisters for men, who should live outside the times!

Every age is an era of violence and despair. Philosophers chronicle the sentiment, not the events, of their society and civilization. Stoicism was the first Western response to such an era, a resigned recognition of decline, crisis, and chaos, a philosophy made especially for ancient Rome.

Roman Stoicism’s most famous representatives make strong figures of character, not philosophers in a systematic sense but philosophers of life: a former slave (Epictetus), an emperor’s tutor (Seneca), and an emperor himself (Marcus Aurelius). Gone was the cultural optimism of Greece in its heyday, still anticipating a perpetual golden age of thought if not policy, dreams pf reason, not chaotic nightmares. From the beginning Rome followed the same trajectory, without formidable external enemies (until the end) to challenge the moral premise of empire.

Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius lived in the very heart of decay and the inevitability of the decline and collapse of the institutions around them. Unlike the Greeks, too, they were disabused of remedies, nostrums, and cultural renewal. The Stoic philosophy they crafted was highly principled while at the same time able to address the core of life and existence just because the era hung so heavily over them.

The Stoic focuses on the self, rescuing the precarious self threatened with extinction by a society obsessed with massive external expressions: vast war, vast fraud, vast plunder, vast wealth, poverty, enslavement, extermination, empire — everything on a grand scale or not at all. Here are the hallmarks of imperial Rome, but also the hallmarks of our modern era, especially since the 20th century. A race toward luxury, consumption, intoxication, and decay is unmitigated by counter-balancing social forces, let alone ethical ques. This is the setting of Stoicism, not because it will reverse the direction or restore morals or champion social tolerance but because it reconciles the self to the reality already sensed.

In the childhood of Marcus Aurelius, Stoic philosophers surrounded him. The fashion of the writer was not yet to attribute wisdom and genius to oneself, so Marcus appended as Book 1 a recital of debt or observation: a list of the names of those to whom he is grateful for his upbringing. He cites his father, mother, grandfather, brother (or cousin) and many contemporary Stoic philosophers, attributing to all of them the values of the Stoic. The modern cynic will reduce this debt to class, for wealth brings refinement, and an imperial throne or equivalent one day. Yet Stoicism requires not more wealth or refinement, which often equates to power, privilege, and ego — the opposite of Stoic values. Rather, Stoicism requires, above all, intelligence. The average person will not likely pursue Stoic values of renunciation and pursuit of mindful self-discipline — nor will the dissipated rich. An intelligence merely sufficient to perceive the next pleasure is not intelligence at all but mutilated instinct.

In Book 2 of his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius tells us:

That which is from fortune is not separate from nature but interwoven with the things which are ordered by providence. From thence all things flow, as does necessity and the advantages of the universe, of which you are a part. Every part of nature is brought into being by nature itself, and is therefor good, serving to maintain nature.

Our tendency is to divide things into good and evil, in our minds objectifying a polarity, though that which is good or evil depends on the degrees of perception and those perceiving. Because we say that earthquakes and fires are evil, we also say that certain cultures and peoples are evil. And as soon as we conclude who is evil, we introduce an element unknown to nature or providence, an alien thing contradicting the universe, which does everything to its advantage, by which the Stoics mean out of natural law, necessity, or physics, indifferently. The universe has no ethical intentionality. For what good we derive for out lives we can be grateful, and for what evil befalls our lives we can be resignedly forbearing, for these goods and evils are relative to our station, to our society and culture, to historical and environmental circumstances. They are doled out evenly in the grand scheme of the universe.

Could anyone be so fortunate of family relations and upbringing as Marcus Aurelius? Note that the paean to others is an afterword written on the last battlefield of his life. For Marcus lived a grand contradiction: an emperor reduced by wisdom to one skeptical of duty and purpose, to its inner vitality and beneficence. He was reduced to fideism (echoed centuries later by another fideist, Montaigne), wherein duty is followed not because it is good but because ethics consists in the necessity to carry out our duty, as if the carrying out alone was ethics, even when the duty is not intrinsically good and could no longer engender faith. Indeed, duty in this sense was Rome itself for Marcus, necessary to defend and maintain even when he no longer believed in its efficacy.

Duty and purpose are dubious worldly enterprises. Yet Stoicism is the philosophy resonating with the perception of failure, attracting intelligent Romans caught within their own unraveling, both of their person and their world. Epictetus was a slave turned Stoic who saw his fate as the prime irony of civilization, the obverse to the akin station of Marcus Aurelius. And before them stands the tutor of emperors, Seneca the aphorist, perhaps once nurturing the hope of making his protege Nero a philosopher-king as Marcus ought to have been. The Stoics knew that all social life means the creation of false values and hypocritical culture. Nero revealed its nature a little while, Marcus only feigned to salvage it.

Not merely powerful elites but some other mechanism seemed to drive the empire, the state, as it does all societies and civilizations. The Stoics learned that nothing changes the world, the world being driven in its course by larger ineffable forces. The Stoics share with Taoism insights of nature but are unique in the West in reclusing even in the midst of the city, even in the midst of the imperial household, let alone in the marketplace of slaves. The universe disposes indifferently. We have but to appreciate the solitude it still bestows on us regardless of our livelihoods, our fortunes, or the civilizations within which we happen live out our lives.

Thich Nhat Hanh writes somewhere that our practice should be such that every action, at every moment, is an expression of love.

By practice he may refer not only to his own Buddhism but to that which we do (anyone does) in the course of life, regardless of belief or ethics. Practice is that which constitutes whatever we do. By love is meant that perfect harmony with reality that permits us to be conscious or aware of our attentiveness toward our selves and to beings around us, living or inanimate, all part of a linked whole. With this consciousness, then, what we do is “love.”

To be conscious of each action (and thought, for that matter, if willfully expressed as an action of mind) seems to be a super-human effort, too scrupulous, too difficult, as if blocking out reality rather than perceiving it. This objection arises because we assign reality only to that which is outside us, that which is objective versus subjective, that which is hard and unflinching and even painful. We are already too aware of this criteria, the objection will run, so that now the flow of thought and action should be synchronized, not in the subjective and soft but in active participation in life and society.

To this rationalist line of argument, participation in what is around us constitutes the only requirement, the only source of life and energy, constitutes our very being. The rationalist argues that we define ourselves by the degree of this involvement or participation, not by our consciousness or “love” of anything, by by the degree of input over things that we hold, by our power or exercise of will. We are not to merely to look at things in contemplation, runs the argument, but actively involve ourselves in the affairs of the world if we are to be fully human.

Though this is a rationalist view, the argument is noticeable in Western thinking in general, including religious thinking derived from Aristotle and Plutarch, where involvement becomes social duty, the complementary counterpart to the rationalist’s economic and political pursuits. A whole civilization has been constructed on the premise that action yields progress, and progress yields leadership and power to those who can afford them, and service from those who cannot.

All of this is opposed to the natural and to the natural world. The rationalist is not concerned with harmony but dominance. We are accustomed to activity not as nature but as culture, such that culture comes to oppose nature, to the point of a military preciseness in opposing nature’s realm. Everything is transformed into prey, into sources of fuel and power, whether objects or people, whether living or inanimate, whether beautiful or expendable, whether threatening or simple and benign. This concept of society is then projected back on to nature, “red in tooth and claw” — when in fct it is human society that is red in tooth and claw, not nature.

To the modern world, social life is to make conquests (“goals and objectives”), to compile lists of pretend friends, to make money, to acquire things, to manipulate people, to consume relentlessly. Such is the extrapolation of reason unmitigated by reflection.

In contrast to the world, where anything above a whisper is already too loud, there is what Thich Naht Hanh calls “love.” Here we must wisely distinguish his term from the sentimentalism that is not part of the core definition. To the world, ruthless and consuming, love is merely the option of circumstance and disposal of events. This view is conveniently still too separate from the larger context of nature.

Rather, love is the quiet harmony within a spectacularly complex universe. Love is that practice that wants to be within that harmony. Indeed, that practice does not want or desire but falls into or becomes part of that harmony by its mere turning. The perfection of that turning is love, and the result is a gradient harmony.

By becoming conscious of what we do and say and imagine and contrive, we can monitor our thoughts and actions, we lay ourselves out and open and apparent to the inquiry of consciousness. We begin to identify our “practice” and can thus go about reshaping it in the practice of making each moment significantly aware not just of ourselves by ourselves in the larger whole. True practice then becomes not forced or effort but indistinguishable from our daily life. But to be at this point of harmony!

By our solitude we automatically open eye and ear to this complexity. We must dispose ourselves to it. Our response need only be to grant each action the quality of attunement. Love is no more than this: that we reciprocate to that which constitutes what is real.

The premise of Kay Larson’s book Where the Heart Beats is revealed in the subtitle: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists. The book is not a musicological treatment but attempts to ascribe Cage’s musical and compositional inspiration to Zen. The nearly 500 pages of biography and gossip (and the artists only of Cage’s circle) identify many parallels, premises, and concurrencies, but fall short on essential points.

Chief among arguments made by the book concerns Zen itself, which Cage derives primarily from D. T. Suzuki and his Columbia University lectures in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By this time Cage, never a formal music student, had not only rejected classical conventions but wanted to outdo Stockhausen’s atonal compositional method, arguing that even the sequential or random inclusion of tonalities in Stockhausen was too old-fashioned. Cage advocated the avant-garde method of making sounds with non-musical objects or sometimes with instruments like the piano with distorted tones. He was to compose this way almost exclusively.

Much of the technique Cage established was pre-Suzuki. Cage’s ideas reproduced not Zen but the late-19th century Parnassian school of literature. The inspiration of modernism since the Impressionists was fast outgrowing musical modalities. After a certain point, the culmination in atonality expressed the limits of aesthetic purpose. Cage’s views on music echo the Parnassian movement’s “art for art sake” premise, wherein the arts no longer have a legitimate audience and become self-serving exercises by the artist, whether out of despair or out of ego.

Atonality based on random sounds Cage came to call “indeterminacy,” borrowing a term popularized by Suzuki. But Cage’s indeterminacy was decidedly not Zen — anymore than the poetry and fiction of the contemporary Beat generation was Zen. Cage used the non-Zen I Ching to identify random patterns in which to fit sounds, flipping coins as needed; from this change arrangement, music comprised of object sounds became a composition.

What is not Zen about the process is, first, that indeterminacy is a term of metaphysics, not art, in Zen, and secondly that aesthetics in Zen, especially in Japan, has never applied chance as a method of artistic expression — not to music, or indeed, to any Zen art (archery, bonsai, calligraphy, etc.). Cage’s idea is a radical misinterpretation, remaking Zen indeterminacy into Western relativism. Cage’s method is echoed in Jackson Pollack’s art of random brushstrokes or random dumps of paint on a blank canvas (what Pollack called “drip painting”), but at least Pollack did not credit his inspiration to Zen, and one could argue that his daemon, his driving force was alcoholism, as it was for so many writers of the era.

Another aspect of Cage’s premise is in separating emotion, will, what he calls “communication,” of the composer from the object. This restates the Parnassian premise, but Larson fails to trace this intellectual process, confirmed in the fact that avant-garde contemporaries were all doing the same thing. By removing an emotional response (as Schopenhauer well puts it), music fails. To convey no emotion, no sense of purpose or responsibility, is not to create, or not to create successfully. Cage seems unaware of his own roots and attributes his ideas to Zen, but the result is clever, flippant, defiant, without conscience, and denies its own value by denying intentionality.

In Cage, the compositional process culminates in his 1954 work 4’33, which is completely silent — or, rather, without notes. The work is not an evocation of silence or even of emptiness in the Zen sense but rather of nothingness in the Western sense, a statement of philosophy rather than aesthetics, art, or music. Audiences are said, even today, to be refreshed by the need not to be engaged by sound but to relax — doubtless impatiently as the piece progresses. Do they applaud at the end? It is Cage’s unconscious joke about meditation, perhaps, or about music itself? Can’t the audience just stay home and sit still for five minutes?

The inevitability of suffering is universally acknowledge, but different strategies exist according to the different traditions, usually as forms of mitigation.

Epicureanism sought to maximize pleasures, however innocuous, the intent being to outdistance suffering through distraction or saturation of mind and senses with positive experiences. This strategy does not equate to hedonism automatically but by degrees, by nature of the pursuit, by intensity and cycle of dependence.

New Age thought, for all its constructive psychology, usually lapses into an eclectic Epicureanism, less rationalistic than Enlightenment utilitarianism, but equally and annoyingly optimistic. In this sense, most people espouse a similar view, even while professing hard-nosed or traditionalist ideas about the universe.

Between the ancient and modern views above were religious views resolving suffering outside the present vale of tears and Enlightenment philosophies promising the best of all possible world with the progress of technology. Both represent a continuum of faith in linear and aspirational belief. Both proffer optimism as a mitigation, not unlike the Epicurean and New Age protocols before and after them.

Is optimism, therefore, a useful device for addressing suffering, seeing how ubiquitous it is? Optimism was savagely criticized by some during the Enlightenment (Voltaire, Swift, for example) but in fact Enlightenment praise for reason approximates the height of optimism, easily refuted by the frustration of progress and the trajectory of modern culture and technology.

Stephen Pinker’s assessment that violence is today at a historical low, based on the ebb of expressed brutality and the falling number of war casualties in world conflicts, seems intrinsically optimistic. What Pinker does not take into account in concluding that violence is ebbing is the rise of technology in abetting authoritarian control over the undisciplined and vicarious brutality and random acts of violence of the past. Nor does his conclusion assess anything but formal violence (assault and battery, or acts of war and combat). Envisioning standing armies clashing on ancient battlefields is not the way to assess violence today. Statistics about the numbers killed by guerrillas, militants, state armies using aircraft, mines, cluster bombs, drones, etc. conceal significant casualties. The concept of violence can be stretched to include potential violence: standing armies, propaganda, domestic surveillance, nuclear and conventional arsenals. The potential violence of military weapons is complemented by the technological violence against the environment. There is no need to itemize what modern civilization has wrecked on the environment. Perhaps calling “violence” what is potential or yet to be realized is a novelty by academic standards.

Optimism, in short, has many obstacles to overcome in arguing that suffering is abating and that mitigation can ease the sorrow of societal and environmental violence. But a more personal optimism seems possible in that sphere of existence that people can change, namely their sense of responsibilities about themselves. Thus, certain behaviors, foods, habits, personal acquaintances, relationships, and circumstances, can be avoided (as would the Epicureans or New Age, for that matter) to avoid entanglements, complications fraught with failure, disappointment, or endangerment to psychological life and physical health.

Simplicity ought to be defined as mitigation, as constructive, not as asceticism or a retreat from engagement. A gospel saying states that not only is killing a major transgression but even saying “Fool!” to another person is equivalent violence. Thus, we need not commit violence as legal (war) to count as violence. Forms of violence to others through antithetical thoughts, and behaviors, and violence to the environment through consumption and waste, constitute forms of perpetuating suffering.

The mitigation of suffering comes not through the head or the senses — i.e., the brain or the body — but through the gut, as it were, through an ethos that brings conviction that we can move past the complications and consequences and justifications by nuance. This may be a form of optimism, but not in anything external, therefore, being what Buddhism calls “faith.” One cannot fear to give offense, nor be offended by the criticisms of others when we renounce the world or the worldly. In that renunciation or simplification we mitigate suffering in a manner that no worldly method can, since it is the worldly itself that propagates suffering.