“God disguised as myriad things
and playing a game of tag
has kissed you and said
‘You’re it..I mean,
you’re REALLY IT’
Now it does not matter
what you believe or feel
for something wonderful,
Major-league Wonderful
is someday going to
happen.”
Hafiz
When we fall in love, each says the other is IT, but there is only one IT seeing itself as that one IT. This creates a virtuous vortex of ever-expanding I AM IT.
The Art of Zen is to fall in love with the IT that is all ITs.
The Subjective is I AM IT! But if that is the only view, inflation occurs. The Subjective must be balanced with the Objective (there are infinite ITS) The balance is ambiguous for they are both of equal value and stand-alone, but opposite. This gestalt image makes the point.
The OW and the YW stand alone but they are ONE, separate but cannot be separated. Satori or Eureka is the realization that I am THAT or IT. That and IT are One but separate.
We are exploring in this Zen Fit how we impose our grammar upon reality and then believe reality fits our grammar of the three persons: First, Second and Third Person. First Person is I, Second person is You, and Third Person is IT or person, place of thing, but IT covers all as Object. First Person is the invisible person.
Our materialistic worldview believes that reality is made of ITS, even you. So in this space/time grid, everything is a particle. The First Person is not on the map. The action or waver cannot be caught as an IT.
So to understand how our grammar frames our world is to see the problem with language, which is out thinking. Thinking is language, and thinking first the laws of our grammar with a believed in subject and object as being two separate entities. This separate is the cause of our suffering, our dissatisfaction with what we write in our book of life.
I used to be an English teacher for three years in the 60s. I failed. I found that the kind of teaching that wanted to come out of me didn’t fit the institution of the textbooks. So at that bipolar stage in my life, it was either my way or the highway. I spent the 70s trying to fit into some institutional system, but I just couldn’t fit the laws of grammar. The poet would not be chopped up by the butcher.
In the late 80s, I got a job writing for the Courier-Record and I learned to fit my poet in the prose of the Newspaper. Poetry is First Person, Prose is Third Person. There are different laws for each person.
This is what the Buddha discovered. When you believed in the laws of thought, which is Third Person, you activate the laws of old age, sickness, and death. This is the wheel of Samsara or sorrow of the world, In Christianity, this is the Cross of crucifixion. How can we get off this cross and its Law, it’s grammar?
How can you be both the Poet and the Prose, the Sacred and the Profane? That is the Hamlet question. This is the question I work with.
When you let your Word flow, there is no error, no red lines, but when you submit it to the English teacher and the Law, you are full of errors.
When you release the Poet, your first concern cannot be with the Law and fitting into its logical compartments. But at the same time, unless there is the Law of writing, you are just creating gibberish.
There is creative spontaneity and there is control through the Law. Obey the rules. How can I be free and spontaneous and still be within the Law. Even Jesus worked with this question.
Our politics is about this question. Don’t shove your law down my throat!
We are not digging deep enough into this question to find an answer.
Grammar makes us stutter. Grammar makes us fear being wrong, getting red-lined: What will the teacher think? What will others think? Our language is the way we express our Word. Our word is laced with fear, we stutter. There is hesitation. Thought keeps asking if I am doing OK. English as our language, when taught as the Law, is not unlike religion where the primary concern is obeying the Law of God.
We notice that we guard our speech when we discover we are in the presence of an English teacher or minister. I’m not saying we don’t need English teachers and ministers, but that we have been conditioned to guard ourselves when in their presence. This is fear of judgment.
What is judgment but being fixed by the eye of the Other as an IT. We fear our First Person being fixed as an IT, an object defined and frozen, pinned on the wall like a dead butterfly. When we are First Person free from being judged, we fly.
When we soar as First Person a law unto ourselves, we are a Trump. So First Person needs the Third Person checks, All ITS, all Third Person IT must conform to the law of IT or things. No thing can escape the law of cause and effect. But if you believe you are First Person with no laws of grammar, then there is going to be an inflation of the Person and a tremendous tension will build between the maverick First Person and the laws of the Third Person.
The Third Person will pull the First Person back into the grammar by force of gravity. No person is above the law, not even the First Person.
The artist, the writer who discovers a metaphorical unity of First and Third Person will sell books and then movies. The create a character, either in their art or as their act that is like the gestalt picture posted. The metaphor, the art is both old woman and young woman, both First Person and Third Person. Through the Art, the viewer perceives art as IT but feels his/her own First Person I. The art awakens our sleeping First Person I AM.
The question is how can I be both First Person I am as the center of the world, and Third Person IT, one of many objects in the world. The IT world must conform to laws of nature and man, but the First Person as center of the world is free because where can the First Person go that he/she is not at the center, or at home. The GPS navigator is a metaphor for the First Person. On the GPS the IT world boots around you. Whenever you move on the IT map, you are still at the center. But without the IT map, there is no movement. The GPS just sits there.
As First Person, we feel constrained by the IT world. Why is that? We feel constrained because of our Grammar or culturing conditioning separate First and Third Person. The Truth is that the WORD is both first and third person, both I and IT, subject and object. When one rises, the other rises. They rise together, neither causing the other. But we believe in our grammar that they are separate, that subjects are going stuff to objects like billiard balls on a grid.
If I’m an IT and a Subject, then I believe that as a Subject and can change my IT self. But let’s go back to our gestalt image. Can the Young Woman (First Person) change the Old Woman (Third Person)?
While our grammar says Subjects act on Objects when it comes to answering the question who am I? Our grammar doesn’t work. The subject and the object rise together, the One that is two, so the subject cannot change the object without changing itself at the same time. When I think I have fixe a problem of me as IT, the problem just comes up in a new way, because the Subject believes it is outside of the object, an observer of the object me as IT. But the subject and object are the same mind, in grammar the same sentence, the same Word. A subject by itself or object by itself doesn’t say anything. Like the GPS, it just sits there. And something that just sits there and doesn’t move cannot be measured, and what cannot be measured is not in time. We cannot even perceive it.