Quote:
Erick Mead wrote:
It is not a question of experience but of development -- and a child has not developed to that point. If you asked she would tell you cars are dangerous. She 'knows' it, consciously, but she cannot act on it naturally and unconsciously. (Oyomei would say that therefore that she does NOT know, until that action is a natural consequence or innate element of the objective perception -- "knowledge and action are one" -- IOW, Boyd's western analytical diagram actually describes an aspect of that Neo-Confucian bit of psychology.)
The mind must develop these facilities, although every one has varying capacity for it, and some more easily develop it than others. Orientation is not a state, it is a process, evolving from the intersection of observation and action together. If it becomes a state it is fixation, obsession. Either observation or action (or both, -- the most pathetic form) have stopped.
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Let's caution ourselves not to introduce unnecessary disagreement through inflexible semantics. The snapshot of a "process" / dynamic model in an instant may be called its "state." The "development" of an entity up to this point may be called its history or "experience." That experience---which may reasonably include, to some extent, "capability"---is limited does not imply that the person is either hindered or swayed by senses or thought; the person may well be "seeing clearly," to borrow from zen.
I grant that the child may be locked onto the ball to the exclusion of all other sensory input and held knowledge, but I also allow the possibility that she is simply unhindered by the concept "traffic is dangerous; the car may not stop; it may kill me"---whether it is because she does not have the concept (maybe grew up where there are no cars, maybe because she is not [yet] capable of making that concept real, ...) or because she is simply not blocked by the concept. From a zennish perspective, the former state is attached, while the later (unblocked version) is unattached and is in some ways preferable---even if it leads to an outcome of being physically squished by a car.
The developed ability to make concepts "real" irrespective of personal experience is considered by many to be neither good nor bad; however, to have natural existence either driven or bounded by---or generally rooted in---conceptual thought (and sensations, and emotions, etc.) is considered by those same folks to be problematic.
The pros and cons of such a philosophy are debatable.
Anyway, as I understand the terms, the not being swayed or driven by anything---including concepts---touches on fudoshin, seeing things openly (like a child) is shoshin, and then there is mushin---which I'm not sure we've pinned down yet.
The characteristic of spontaneity has been picked up by others in this thread---my apologies then for picking on Erick's entries to the apparent exclusion of the others---I see they are all very interesting. Spontaneity seems to be an essential aspect of takemusu. The ability to act "outside" of one's base tendencies in the face of the stimuli-du-jour rather than being swept away in cause and effect is by some accounts what makes people people---free will, in some interpretations.
More on that later, I'm sure---I'm heading out for a bit
