ZEN, ARCHERY, ECKER & DERNINI

I started to take a journey... the same journey I took maybe thirty years ago. I knew that I was attracted to ZEN because in some small way, it seemed similar to Phenomenology, which I had been introduced to by my colleague who seemed almost like a Zen Master to me. David Ecker taught in the art department at NYU Steinhardt. He was an arts craftsman and art philosopher. I had completed my doctorate at Columbia University, and never once had any class introduced or discussed phenomenology. In some ways David Ecker was my Zen Master who led me through endless inquiries that opened my world.

We had many adventures together, and they alone would be worthy of discussion and documentation, even now. 

I happened to try the Audible book for Zen in the Art of Archery.  Forget it! It's better to let your imagination conjure up the sound of the master's voice. The reader on Audible distorts his voice to attempt to sound like a Zen Master, but it just doesn't work for me.

But I am sympathetic to Herrigel's quest. He made many assumptions about what the experience of learning Zen through what the Japanese consider a deep and profound art grounded in the way of Zen...much more than a philosophy. There is a spiritual connection that is difficult for those of us who have been biased by Western philosophy and assumptions. 

David Ecker is no longer with us. But his presence lingers. He pursued the creation of knowledge through experiments such as Navigating Global Cultures. It so happened that a marvelous artist and inquirer, Sandro Dernini, came to study with David Ecker in the Art Department at NYU . I was fortunate enough to tag along and help in the launching of marvelous experiments in art as a way of knowing and inquiring---of ART as the disruptor.

So my journey here was originally planned as a shared adventure, but it fell by the way because Time had other plans. I pause now in the debris of a botched beginning that turned into a new opportunity of discovery. I see many of my past mentors in their separate journeys, but somehow beckoning me to be out and about. Life is perpetual discovery, uncovering each moment as immortal. 

WHO IS PHADREAS?

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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?

A NEW ODYSSEY...

How long have I been away? It's difficult to calculate. My last entry was not a return. That was an experiment with a digital magazine. 

 

I have been lost in some corridor without dimension, trying to find my way back to the conscious awareness that has always connected me to myself. These last few months...few days...I have somehow stumbled back...Phaedrus is alive, but perhaps it is still too tenuous, too embryonic, to know what is really going on. 

 

Phaedrus is still shrouded by the shadows...I pause in the deep shadows of the ether that obscures identity and launches a search... a wandering away from the bright avenues of deceit and destruction, looking for some opening through which I might return, from where I might escape into the fullness of myself...into the awareness of Being...where clarity reigns. But I know there is no such moment as clarity. Clarity requires Time to become timeless, where process stagnates into shrill stillness... we slip into the silence and its illusion as a tapestry of sound. 

 

I have been wandering. I've wandered since my earliest days in Texas...and the globe has been a gracious host. I heard Whitman calling me to join him in his wanderings, and I began to journey with him by my side and in my veins, beckoning me to find a clearing where we might rest and exchange notes. I should have perished long ago, but something lingers...not from the Past,  but from the Future... for wandering is an endless excursion into what might be and what might have been. And these wanderings have led to some phenonmenal experiments in Research as Lived Experience...in Heideggerian jousting with BEING AND TIME and the languaging of the world...in Hegel's even more dazzling Phenomenology of Spirit, as a quest for knowing and meaning which in some ways seems almost like a Western Civilization attempt to read between the lines of the Tao Te Ching.

 

I follow the footsteps of Whitman's wandering in search of his lingering presence...in search of our lingering presence, for we are all wanderers seeking the truth of ourselves. We are all embarked upon The Way... ultimately this is our journey as the infinite manifestation of Being.

 

I remember as I entered my 70s, I was surprised to still be around, somehow stuck in the ever enduring Now. My wanderings were over a vast internal terrain where I thought I was meant to discover or meet someone or some revelation about my true identity. Moving through life, I was constantly meeting and celebrating new arrivals in my conscious awareness that expanded my experience and created new horizons to pursue. I was surprised to find myself still seeking the next realm of revelation as decades passed.

 

SEGUE
 Begun six decades past...
 I always thought it might not last.
 But this is not the final word
 Many conversations still not heard...
 Somehow I’m still seeking text
 To reveal what might happen next.
 For me, text is not about the past...
 it’s more about making the present last.
 Noticing the moment with a pen
 Adds permanence and creates a “when”.
 
 But these words are more than just a start...
 The texting here is from the heart.
 This volume, was begun so long ago,
 When I was young—-so much I didn’t know.
 Now I know no matter what my age,
 Infinity expects another page.

 

So these postings, these wanderings, begin another phase of this adventure, but more importantly to notice the NOW of BEING and the process of BECOMING. These themes have emerged from my encounters with the dynamics of awareness. It seems that everything emerging is Forever unfolding the Nowness of Now. We've launched the James Webb Space Telescope a million miles into space to peer backward into Time... to some so-called beginning which is as much conjecture as it is a reality. It is challenging to be trapped in the permanence of Now seeking paths to the past and future...