Human beings are divided into the mature and the immature,into those who have a responsible knowledge of the Absolute and try to conform to it and those who do not. They are divided into those who accept the demands of practice and those who do not, and what finally counts is whether they try to realize themselves in a humanity that relies on immanent transcendence to lift humanness to a higher level, and so fulfill their true human destiny.
Karlfried Graf Durckheim, Absolute Living
And the emptiness turns its face and whispers, 'I am not empty, I am open.'
Tomas Transtromer, Vermeer
In other words, there are those who in-source, and those who outsource. The latter buy into convention, and the socio-economic contract without really giving it another thought. They unthinkingly go through life on pre-fabricated sub-routines, embedded in this dialectic of toil and recovery, destruction-construction, compression-decompression... It's a cycle that is rarely life-enhancing, and more life-depleting. They work in order to consume. They consume, presumably, not because they need to, but because they've been duped into doing so. It is as the situationist Raoul Vaneigm once said, a hellish cycle. But it needn't be like that.
There are plenty of opportunities to get in touch with the Absolute around Glasgow, in those hills, in those vast empty spaces and 'primordial breaks', in the coast, around the islands, on those empty single-track back-roads.... in the mind that is open to it all.
Glasgow is thus a blessed place, and not just blessed by Serf's bull, but blessed by it's gently undulating topography, by its invigorating and refreshing climate, by its peculiar and idiosyncratic people, and by its wild-life, not so wild as it once was but wild enough to re-mind us who we are. All these places and spaces point the way to an initiation and the initiatory, the primal and the primordial.
As Karlfried Graf Durckheim states in his book Absolute Living: To follow the Way of initiation is to follow a way of practice, a way that means exercise - tirelessly working on the self.
In a previous chapter, Durckheim had written:
'Today (the book was published in 1968), it is generally recognized that the West is overactive, and needs to grasp what doing nothing really means. It must learn to appreciate and accept those meditative practices that are, as initiation exercises, an essential part of traditional life-guidance in the East'.
This 'cycling' is an initiatory practice. It is, as the word's etymology suggests, an opening into the mystery of Life and of Living. Heidegger, who was not a million miles away from Durckheim, called this 'initiation' Gelassenheit or 'releasement', but both indicated the same thing. A move away from certainty and scientism, and a move towards the great mystery and openness to the earth at large as a living breathing entity in which we find our plant-like selves caught up.
The three aspects that Durckheim identifies as essential to perceiving Being are:
1. Developing the sensitivity needed for contact with Being.
2. Gaining insight into the conditions on which the experience of Being depends.
3. Practicing to eliminate everything that separates us from Being and develop everything that connects us with it.
The cycling into the hills, into these spaces, is that 'training' and 'practice', is the development of these three aspects, in not just dispelling the nonsense that you have been infected with (consider the workaday world as some form of Trojan horse) but in inoculating the self with the mind's eye that has been glazed over by too much non-essential toil and distraction.
The hills themselves have the added bonus of being Earth. And Earth is this mysterious entity (how could you call it anything else?) in which/out of which we grow, flow, and if we're on the right path, flourish and flower. The sea, the coast, the hills, the land (outwith the heavy-handedness of man's impact) all have this mysterious quality in abundance, and our inability to perceive it - this enchantment and this magic! - is all a result of our not paying attention to the above aspects.
Man could do a lot worse than cycling into the hills under his own steam, and when he gets there, perching upon a rock, and contemplating nothing in general. But of course, as Durckheim points out, the West has a rather negative connotation of this 'doing nothing'. Yet, the man-world can only be saved, can only be returned to the human world, through a conscientious process of 'doing nothing' and 'contemplating nothing'.
We are after all not 'things'.
Glasgow is thus a blessed place, and not just blessed by Serf's bull, but blessed by it's gently undulating topography, by its invigorating and refreshing climate, by its peculiar and idiosyncratic people, and by its wild-life, not so wild as it once was but wild enough to re-mind us who we are. All these places and spaces point the way to an initiation and the initiatory, the primal and the primordial.
As Karlfried Graf Durckheim states in his book Absolute Living: To follow the Way of initiation is to follow a way of practice, a way that means exercise - tirelessly working on the self.
...initiatory work is not something we do but something that we allow to happen. it means listening, hearing, obeying, surrendering to a process, and admitting a new reality that touches us in ourselves and in everything around us, calling on us to change in a very special way, and impelling us to do so.
In a previous chapter, Durckheim had written:
'Today (the book was published in 1968), it is generally recognized that the West is overactive, and needs to grasp what doing nothing really means. It must learn to appreciate and accept those meditative practices that are, as initiation exercises, an essential part of traditional life-guidance in the East'.
This 'cycling' is an initiatory practice. It is, as the word's etymology suggests, an opening into the mystery of Life and of Living. Heidegger, who was not a million miles away from Durckheim, called this 'initiation' Gelassenheit or 'releasement', but both indicated the same thing. A move away from certainty and scientism, and a move towards the great mystery and openness to the earth at large as a living breathing entity in which we find our plant-like selves caught up.
The three aspects that Durckheim identifies as essential to perceiving Being are:
1. Developing the sensitivity needed for contact with Being.
2. Gaining insight into the conditions on which the experience of Being depends.
3. Practicing to eliminate everything that separates us from Being and develop everything that connects us with it.
The cycling into the hills, into these spaces, is that 'training' and 'practice', is the development of these three aspects, in not just dispelling the nonsense that you have been infected with (consider the workaday world as some form of Trojan horse) but in inoculating the self with the mind's eye that has been glazed over by too much non-essential toil and distraction.
The hills themselves have the added bonus of being Earth. And Earth is this mysterious entity (how could you call it anything else?) in which/out of which we grow, flow, and if we're on the right path, flourish and flower. The sea, the coast, the hills, the land (outwith the heavy-handedness of man's impact) all have this mysterious quality in abundance, and our inability to perceive it - this enchantment and this magic! - is all a result of our not paying attention to the above aspects.
Man could do a lot worse than cycling into the hills under his own steam, and when he gets there, perching upon a rock, and contemplating nothing in general. But of course, as Durckheim points out, the West has a rather negative connotation of this 'doing nothing'. Yet, the man-world can only be saved, can only be returned to the human world, through a conscientious process of 'doing nothing' and 'contemplating nothing'.
We are after all not 'things'.
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