Thinking About Thinking

     I think much of what we call "intelligence" is our ability to recognize patterns. We recognize similarities (stellar galaxies and water emptying from a bathtub spiral in the same way), sequences (the steps you go through to start a car), processes (how to convert grapes into wine), cycles (the periodic boom and bust of the pork belly market), distributions (the large number of post World War II babies), movements (smoke over an airplane wing in a wind tunnel), shapes (cracks in dried mud usually form 120° angles), tendencies (the influence of anyone who appears on the cover of Time magazine has crested), and probabilities (the 49ers usually win their home games).
— Roger von Oech, A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, p. 34.

     Goethe is the great apologist of the world of appearances. He attributed to what is regarded as the surface of things an interest and a value in which I observe a frankness and a bias that seems to me of the utmost importance.
     He understood that if we perceive an infinity of sensations that are useless in themselves, it is nevertheless from them, ununimportant as they are, that we have extracted, through a curiosity which is entirely gratuitous and an attention which is a pure luxury, the whole of our science and our art. I sometimes think that there exists for some people, as there existed for him, an external life which has an intensity and a depth at least equal to the intensity and depth that we ascribe to the inner darkness and the mysterious discoveries of the ascetics and the Sufis. What a revelation the first painful and marvelous flicker of daylight on the retina must be for the person who was born blind! And what solid progress, progress without any slipping back, he must feel he is gradually making toward the limits of knowledge — the sharpness of forms and of bodies!
     The interior world, on the contrary, is always threatened by a medley of obscure sensations, memories, tensions, unspoken words, where what we wish to observe and to grasp changes and in a sense depraves the act of observation itself.... We can barely conceive or give a hint of what is meant by thinking a thought, and as soon as we reach that second stage, as soon as we try to raise our consciousness to that second power, everything at once becomes blurred....
     Goethe observes, contemplates and — sometimes in the plastic arts — pursues form, in an effort to decipher the motive of whatever it was that drew or modeled the work or object he happens to be examining. The same man who was capable of so much passion, of so much freedom, of all the caprices of feeling and the unexpected creations of the poetic mind, took delight in becoming an observer of inexhaustible patience; he devoted himself to the most meticulous of botonical and anatomical studies, the results of which he described in the simplest and most precise language.
     That is one more proof of the diversity — and what might almost be called the ordinary incompatibility — of gifts which is essential to minds of the highest order.
— Paul Valéry, "Address in Honor of Goethe," in Masters and Friends, pp. 161-162.

....Then we touched the ground with our fingers still clasped and later stood upright and stretched our hands to the sky. This was done seven times to honor the seven directions: north, south, east, west, above, below, and within....
— Marlo Morgan, "My Oath," in Mutant Message Down Under, p. 141.

     I have described all this in detail in order to illustrate an important point: these first instructions given me by the swami had no reference to the cult of any personal God-figure or divine incarnation. The assumptions they contained — that the Reality exists and can be contacted and known — were nondualistic assumptions. Knowledge of the Reality, in this context, means unitive knowledge — i.e. The realization that you, essentially, are the Reality, always were the Reality, and always will be. Where, then does the personal God-figure fit into this philosophy? Is there a place for him at all?
     Yes, there is. The dualistic God — the God-who-is-other-than-I — is an aspect of the Reality but not other than the Reality. Within the world of phenomena — the world of apartness, of this and that, of we and you — the God-who-is-other-than-we is the greatest phenomenon of all. But, with the experience of unitive, nondualistic knowledge, the God-who-is-other-than-I merges into the God-who-is-myself. The divine phenomena are seen to be all aspects of the one central Reality.
     Let me deal with one simple misunderstanding which troubled me, and may trouble my readers. To say "I am God" is at one and the same time the most blasphemous statement you could possibly make, and also the truest. It all depends on what you mean by "I." If you mean, "my ego is God, Christopher Isherwood is God," then you are blaspheming; if you mean "my essential Self is God," then you are speaking the truth. It follows from this that you can never become one with God-who-is-other-than-you — for "God" in this sense is also a projection of the central Reality. If you struggle, through meditation, for unitive knowledge of, let us say, Christ, there are two obstacles between you and its realization. One of them is your own individuality; the other is the individuality of Christ himself. If union is achieved, both these individualities must disappear; otherwise, the Reality within you cannot merge with the Reality within Christ.
     This concept must naturally seem shocking to anyone who has been raised within a purely dualistic attitude to religion. And yet, for the nondualist, the dualist approach to God seems altogether appropriate and, in many cases, preferable. It is  almost impossible for me, in my average unregenerate state, to believe that I am a temple which contains the Reality. All I know of myself is my ego, and that appears to be a pretty squalid temple containing nothing of any value. So it is natural for me to turn toward some other being, one who really acts and speaks and appears as though the Reality were within him. By making a cult of this being — by adoring him and trying to resemble him — I can gradually come to an awareness of the Reality within myself. There you have the whole virtue of the cult.
— Christopher Isherwood, "How I Came to Vedanta," in The Wishing Tree, pp. 23-24.