Full Wholeness

1 Response to Full Wholeness

1. David Filippone says:

   June 27, 2016 at 12:04 pm

   Hi Hayward,

   I like this ‘story’ you told so much it kept percolating in me… then I was reading an old ‘TSK Inquiry’ website post entitled ‘The World is Made of Stories’, that Bruce posted. He was reading The World is Made of Stories, by David Loy, and posted some excerpts…I think you’ll find it interesting. (See the link below)

   http://timespaceknowledge.socialgo.com/forum/topic/422

   The unity of a human life is the unity of a narrative quest. Quests sometimes fail, are frustrated, abandoned or dissipated into distractions; and human lives may in all of these ways also fail. But the only criteria for success or failure in a human life as a whole are the criteria of success or failure in a narrated or to-be-narrated quest.
   ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

   The Buddhist understanding of karma emphasizes intentionality as the key to self-transformation. The stories and roles that constitute my identity incorporate different tendencies. Spiritual development involves minimizing unwholesome motivations (greed, ill will, delusion) and reinforcing the more wholesome ones (generosity, loving-kindness, wisdom). New stories and roles are possible because I am that narrative and I also am not that narrative. I am that narrative because such stories compose my sense of self. Yet if the self were only that narrative there would be no possibility of abandoning that story and obtaining a new one. For identity to change, there must be something other than that narrative, something that is not bound by it.

   Any attempt to characterize that “something other” gives it a role within my stories, yet it cannot be fixated in this way. It is not part of any particular narrative, for it is that which allows narratives to be mutable. Even describing it in this fashion pulls it into a narrative — the one you are reading right now — but anything conceptualized cannot be “it.” Since it can never be identified as any-thing within a story, it always remains a non-thing, a condition of the possibility of storying.

   The fact that we can never “fully know” reality is not a sign of the limitation of our knowledge, but the sign that reality itself is “incomplete,” open, an actualization of the underlying virtual process of Becoming. ~Slavoj Zizek.

   We actualize reality, without ever completing it, with stories. Our stories are never finished; and therefore never unfinished. If reality itself is always incomplete, each moment becomes complete in itself, lacking nothing.

   No quest can attain its object without giving rise to further quests without ending. This incessant response is the ultimate (because never final) act of transcendence by which the quest as narrative goes on achieving its transformative goal, thus escaping the closure that would end it and by ending annul it. ~Paul Ricoeur

   The most interesting quest narratives pursue something that is unattainable in the way sought. In the process of questing, however, the one who quests is transformed.

   By foreclosing any closure, no-thing-ness transcends whatever situation one finds oneself in. I may be so caught up in stories and roles that I am unaware of my no-thing-ness, yet “it” is never bound. Like a prisoner whose cell gate has never been locked, I may not notice this freedom but insofar as I am “it” there is never anything to attain, only something to realize and actualize.

   This understanding of our double-sidedness is a key that opens many treasure boxes.”

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