Days...Months...Years have passed and yet, Phadreas has remained in the background. Phadreas has eluded me for years despite my attempts to find him and bring clarity to my wanderings. I’m not sure why he has emerged at this moment as an enigma that must be confronted. Yet, there he is, with his gleaming eyes and mysterious smile that bewilders and confronts me. It is not because he is amused, but rather that he understands what I seek, even though he won’t reveal anything to me directly.
Phadreas is the shadow of my thinking, and my thinking is the essence of my Being, my sense of All and the essence of Allness, which we often call Eternity. Eternity is the contradiction of Time ending. Time and Being, as Heidegger so eloquently observed, are the essence of existence, the fundamental pulse that dismisses the void and utter disintegration.
Phaedrus often lurks around the entrance to my DOJO. As written in Wikipedia, a DoJo is a place for immersive and experiential learning. In Japanese, it literally means PLACE OF THE WAY. A few years ago I tripped out on Neil Diamond's THE WAY, where the musical structure continually shifts its grounding, it is a musical journey seeking closure but ends in an echoing rift of ongoingness. (Wyzard Ways: BEING ON TIME)
My journey deepens as I retrace the steps of a student of Zen In The Art of Archery. How important our process of Being is linked to Breathing... even to inspire is to take in... inspiration comes from our effortless breathing...appropiating the outside and bringing it into the center of ourselves, and holding it as it nourishes all life processes, then exhaling to return a transformed energy to our environment. Breathing and Being are central to our existence. The student working with the Zen Mastery is from a different culture. Coming from Germany to Japan, he brought a certain Western resistance to the Japanese ethos of Zen. His journey is about reconciling his cultural clash with a different and equally valid reality. It is not unlike F.S.C. Northrop's The Meeting of East and West, that reveals how the war with Japan was inevitable as a clash of cultural values, and how this meeting of two opposing cultures transformed our ideas about Art and Existence.
Later Robert M. Pirsig would build upon this cultural dichotomy with his epic Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Years ago, I took this journey with Pirsig, and now, decades later, I renew this quest for a deeper understanding of my own journey. But I do not journey alone. This time the quest is with an artist searching a different artistic itinerary, and yet as we work within mutual boundaries of awareness, we may discover new destinations, new clearings in the dense forests of doubt.
It seems that life itself is the journey, and from the beginnings of our utterings on Earth, since antiquity, Homer's The Odyssey defined our quest to return home, for we awaken in a wilderness and know not whom we are.
In the end, isn't our quest about Identity?
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