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No Sunday Zooms Until June 28th

Hi Folks,
Please note that the next Sunday Zoom meeting will be on June 28th owing to other commitments including some upcoming travel. Apropos that, there are still some spaces available for the London retreat, June 13/14 - if interested, email me at: john@johnastin.com.

Best,
John

CATEGORIES (from This Extraordinary Moment)

Essentially, categories don’t exist, at least not as actualities; they are conceptual abstractions. For example, take the category “flowers.” Flowers represent a class of things which share certain characteristics. However, in order to place the obviously unique objects we call a rose, a marigold, and a tulip in the same conceptual category, we must overlook those distinctive features such as shape, color, and texture we consider to be nonessential elements of the category. This perceptual censorship enables us to create the myriad abstract, conceptual categories we are all quite familiar with.

Let’s look at another category of phenomena, a rose. If you were to take any two objects conventionally labeled as “roses,” they’d undoubtedly share certain features that allow us to group them together conceptually. However, if we look carefully, it can be seen that even if the roses are very similar in terms of size, shape, color, petal formation, and so on, no rose is ever precisely the same as another.

And so, that beautiful red object you see growing in your garden—even if you might have a conventional word to describe it, a closer look reveals that you can’t say precisely what it is owing to its distinctive nature; it’s literally in a class by itself. Even if there exist other objects that appear to resemble it, there is nothing quite like this one. Given that this thing we call a rose is uniquely itself, to place it in some general category of things is to oversimplify the unthinkable complexity that it actually exhibits. When we look at what we conventionally call a rose, the reality is that we’re not really looking at a rose; we are looking at something we’ve never actually seen before. For no matter how closely it may appear to resemble other things, that which we’re viewing is an utterly unique configuration of shape, color, and texture. And so only by censoring out or overlooking its uniquely distinctive features are we able to categorize anything.

As you sit here, try to characterize, in a word or two, your predominant state of mind at this moment. Whatever your word is (calmness, agitation, elation, confusion, fatigue, joy), just note it silently to yourself.

Now, let’s say your word is “fatigue.” Like every other description, fatigue represents our attempt to characterize what is ultimately an inconceivably complex pattern of perceptual phenomena. An experience appears, which we then recognize in some way as having arisen before: “Oh, I know what that is, it’s fatigue (or whatever your word was).” But actually, while the pattern we’re experiencing is certainly reminiscent of something we’ve encountered before, it is not the same as any previous perceptual moment. At least not exactly…

With that notion in mind, just feel your present experience, however you may be labeling it.

Sure, it may seem as if you can place it in some category as I suggested. But can you sense how complex and multidimensional, how ultimately uncharacterizable and utterly unique this experience actually is?

Can you feel how, even if it has certain familiar features and characteristics that remind you of other moments like it, the experience is unlike anything you’ve ever felt or encountered before?

The reality is that each experience is unique. It belongs to no category, owing to its completely original nature.

So what does this all mean? Well, it points to the fact that because no two moments are exactly alike, there is no actual reference point to know what anything or any experience is. This flash instant that’s appearing has, quite literally, never come into existence before, at least not exactly like this. Every moment is a complete original! And so experiences cannot be known, cannot be named, cannot be conceptualized or categorized without overlooking so much of the depth and detail that makes each instant the utterly unique expression of life that it is.

Yes, we can name and categorize things in order to make sense of ourselves and the world and communicate with each other. But even as we continue to do this, which we likely will until our final breath, we can appreciate that experience cannot fit neatly into any of our categories or concepts. It’s simply too big, too complex, too multifaceted for that.

And just as objects (such as roses) and experiences (such as fatigue) are too vast and multidimensional to be held by our categories and names, so too are we. We are not what we were a year, a month, or even a second ago; we are, like every other phenomenon, ever-changing from moment to moment, even if in barely perceptible ways. And because of this, defining or categorizing ourselves is not actually possible without overlooking our inherently dynamic nature.

Who we are is literally not who we were even a nanosecond ago. Any definitions of who and what we are could only ever be based on memory, on some image or idea of ourselves. But that is simply not what we are now. Because reality is inherently unstable and impermanent, we are, quite literally, beyond definition, beyond any possibility of being categorized according to any set of seemingly stable qualities or characteristics. What we are is this actuality, this reality arising right now in a way it has never before arisen.