The Voyages of Brendan

The Travel of Journey of Joshua T. Harvey, World Traveler, in honor of St. Brendan the Navigator

6.24.2006

Yielding Returns (Day 23)

Today has been a true day of rest and catching up on lost sleep. It has been a lazy, thinking day, with some light grocery shopping thrown in, plus some reading and World Cup matches. We got an e-mail from Ted, which was wonderful; he is missed, though Helene and I are still kicking it, gangster-style, as evident from our adventure with the police. I am not so sure Ted isn't glad that he wasn't here for that.

We found out today that Theresa, our boss, will be flying in Wednesday. We will have to prepare the house for her. I am glad that I took Ted and Father Alan's room with the double bed in it, having lived in the office for three weeks; Helene will have to move into it next week.

The rest of today's writings are highly philosophical and are dedicated to Dane Boston, Daniel Brinson, and Harry Pemberton, whose free-time and class-time allowed such thoughts to be birthed and discussed. Sometimes the baby is unruly, other times it is tame, other times, simply ridiculous. Read on if you dare.

The thought occurred that if Tao (is) yielding, free will can enter in.

Yielding (is) open to all, including non-yielding. If yielding (is) the way of the universe, it can admit of the capacity for non-yielding. To use an example from Heidegger, if someone is blind, it is because he always already had the ability or capacity for sight; it is simply now dysfunctional: sightedness is a prerequisite for blindness. Similarly, yielding is a prerequisite for non-yielding. The simple use of the prefix “non” must include the “yielding” portion of the phenomena to make sense, otherwise it would just be “non” with no other phenomenal characteristics whatsoever. Yielding allows non-yielding to pass by.

One could argue that you could simply chose “closed-ness”, for example, as a descriptor, but closed-ness does not allow for the possibility of motion; it is locked up, unable to breathe. If the universe (is) non-yielding, it cannot admit of anything—no motion, movement, creation, destruction. It could have no (is) about it, because it would [(be)] (not-is). Some openness must exist to allow safe passage of existence. Yielding and non-yielding are active, both noun and verb, and so do not have the finality of either “closedness” or “openness,” though “openness” is pregnant with potential to both emptiness and form—in a word, the ability to yield to such appearances or non-appearance. As such, yielding can admit of its opposite, while non-yielding cannot.

With the open space of yielding possible, the ability to form a block to its movement, non-yielding, remains in-tow. The blockage of the movement only serves to more fully define the openness. We can view the un-viewable: emptiness. To overturn the aforementioned illustration in order to show the phenomenological nature of this freely admitted limitation (because yielding admits of non-yielding), we are actually blinder to what we experience because we are mostly living in the world of form—the blocked movement, and what we underlies this form is free of quality: it is emptiness, ether.
The blocking nature of non-yielding shows allows us to see the emptiness as emptiness, because it is form defined as form.

This yielding is beyond the pull of Being and beings, of the ontological difference. It is, in fact, the movement, the worm-hole, between the two that allows existence to exist and move to be experienced. It allows us to experience and make experience happen—the safe passage of existence. It is like a tunnel, open to movement and defined by its walls, its limits. In the realm of its openness it is the clearing for appearing and non-appearing, Being, emptiness; in the realm of its limits, it is form, beings. It lets loose the space between noun and verb, subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity—but it (is) beyond these, prior. It moves with and through and under and around.

It (is) of its own accord. Being the ground of all existence, movement, and reality, it (is) itself in the moment of interaction with it. It yields choice or not-choice. With yielding inherent to non-yielding and non-yielding the defining limits of yielding, the echo of such movement can be found in choice: to be or not to be, for example. Free will can open up to choosing or not choosing. Further, we can choose to align ourselves with such yielding, or choose not-to-yield. Yielding must yield to choice, otherwise, it would [(be)] not-yielding.

EDH: 9PM-4:30 AM

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