Thursday, April 16, 2009
Getting Started
What would be a most basic and essential approach to a meditation on the Prologue of the St. John Gospel?
To start with, meditate on in. Georg often pointed out that relationship words (i.e., prepositions) or interrupters like however or although are excellent subjects because they cannot be further defined. While prepositions may suggest polarities (in-out; to-from; before-after), the individual terms can be considered singly. Words like although defy definition. They must be intuited. Because they offer little to invite distracting, tangential explanations, the movement of attention from the sign although to the gesture of its moving meaning may be experienced more easily than with complex abstractions such as—organization or democracy.
That movement, from the signs or individual words of a meditative text, to the signs’ and sentence’s underlying and not-fixed meaning source is our goal (even the apparent contradiction between movement and goal is intriguing). What is central here is that it is our attention and intention that provide the heat. What color the flame will be is up for discovery.
After you’ve gone a stretch with in, you might then graduate to In beginning. Beginning has three basic components: be-ginn-ing. The last is simply ing which indicates the noun form of an activity or state. Be – is a primary meaning. Exist is a synonym for be, but only substitutes without really modifying (some might consider be as more active). And ginn can be traced to ginnan (to cut open, or open up in older English and Germanic sources). Of course, the suggestion of a connection to generare – to produce in Latin—or the Greek genos meaning race or offspring is hard to avoid.
Georg Kühlewind often called the ability to begin the essential human faculty. What else can we do? Please tell us about your experiments!
Walter Alexander
To start with, meditate on in. Georg often pointed out that relationship words (i.e., prepositions) or interrupters like however or although are excellent subjects because they cannot be further defined. While prepositions may suggest polarities (in-out; to-from; before-after), the individual terms can be considered singly. Words like although defy definition. They must be intuited. Because they offer little to invite distracting, tangential explanations, the movement of attention from the sign although to the gesture of its moving meaning may be experienced more easily than with complex abstractions such as—organization or democracy.
That movement, from the signs or individual words of a meditative text, to the signs’ and sentence’s underlying and not-fixed meaning source is our goal (even the apparent contradiction between movement and goal is intriguing). What is central here is that it is our attention and intention that provide the heat. What color the flame will be is up for discovery.
After you’ve gone a stretch with in, you might then graduate to In beginning. Beginning has three basic components: be-ginn-ing. The last is simply ing which indicates the noun form of an activity or state. Be – is a primary meaning. Exist is a synonym for be, but only substitutes without really modifying (some might consider be as more active). And ginn can be traced to ginnan (to cut open, or open up in older English and Germanic sources). Of course, the suggestion of a connection to generare – to produce in Latin—or the Greek genos meaning race or offspring is hard to avoid.
Georg Kühlewind often called the ability to begin the essential human faculty. What else can we do? Please tell us about your experiments!
Walter Alexander
Labels: beginning, getting started
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