“The lower space we live in is not a solid and continuous place. It changes, becoming more or less open, with each single thought.†TSK 244. This quote also raises a separate but deeply important question: is each thought its own ‘logos’? Its own read-out?
Logos according to the glossary of LOK is the governing understanding active within a temporal order. The ‘logos’ operates in accord with a specific and characteristic logic, establishing possibilities and defining limits. On a lower-level, the ‘logos’ is invisible, operating as ‘the (temporal) way things are’. With more knowledge, the focal setting shifts, and the ‘logos’ becomes accessible as a structure to be investigated in terms of prevailing ‘read-outs’. As investigation continues, the distinction between ‘logos’ as knowledge and ‘logos’ as the prevailing order of time and space gives way to a more comprehensive ‘knowingness.
Logos is more pervasive, while read-out is only a focal setting of the whole. The important question raised above only applies in terms of a deeper or higher knowledge, because in the lower level the logos is invisible, and the read-outs are not independent and self-contained.
In a deeper level it is possible to say that a thought is a read-out of the logos, a communicative output by time of a particular focal setting on space. TSK 244 tells about the changes from one thought to another, and invites us to be sensitive to such changes focusing on the healthy ones and letting go of the others.
Perhaps a read-out can lead us have a glimpse of the logos, or the whole, it is just a matter of being open. This reminds me a Haikai from Basho:
When I look carefully
I see the nazuna blooming
by the hedge!
Nazuna is almost negligible plant blooming by the old dilapidated hedge along the remote country road, so innocently, so unpretentiously, not at all desiring to be noticed by anybody. Yet when one looks at it, how tender it is! Its very humbleness, its unostentatious beauty, evokes one’s sincere admiration.
Hi Eliana,
I’m still trying to catch up. But fortunately, time is not late and never has been.
I appreciate your exploration of the Logos and inquiry into whether the Logos itself changes or just the focal length with which we view it. Your distinction between logos and focal setting feels useful.
I remain confused by what the Logos is and how it relates to “Higher Knowledge”, on the one hand, and the subject, with its particular way of knowing, on the other.
Perhaps this confusion is a natural response to something ambiguous in the image of a Logos. Perhaps the Logos has one foot in a higher kind of knowledge (since it is not itself a product of subject/object duality) and another foot in the ordinary world (since it provides the logical framework for our experience of that world). Perhaps the Logos is a hybrid, half fish, swimming in the ocean depths, half mermaid, calling out to humans from a sun-warmed rock. And we can know both the sunlit world and the hidden depths by recognizing that a presence beyond clock-time, beyond substantial objects, and beyond fixed identities, makes all our experience possible.