To Infinity and Beyond!
During a challenging conversation this evening about the nature of morality, I happened to stumble across a brilliant little metaphor which I wanted to share with you today.
There will be, I fear, a terrible danger in your reading this: that you will jump all too quickly to the refrain of “but that’s merely a metaphor”, in response to what I hope will be a graceful yet vivid expression of my mental picture, so to speak. In response to this charge I can only ask for an epoché, I can only call for my audience to suspend their judgement and reanimate that crucial, cool criticality once they have seen whence my river of words hath carried them. You see, for me at least, there is no such thing as ‘merely’ metaphorical ideas, because I am a strong proponent of the point of view that all abstract thinking is metaphorical in nature, and indeed of the perspective that metaphor is central to thought from the seed to the flower to the fruit and back again. Yet, marvel upon marvel, it is this centrality of metaphor itself which can become so profound when we truly peer into its depths, as the very notion of centrality begins to whisper arcane secrets in our ears. The foundation of much of our abstract reasoning is rooted in body-based experiences of space and, more importantly, of motion within that space. Listen carefully to the insights embedded in that space.
Movement was perhaps the first and most primary problem of existence for the longest time imaginable, and consequently our brains are best evolved to map movement schemas and the motion of objects and entities within our environment. To move through our environment hitting all the relevant targets and to continue moving forward, ever onward, is a pattern which resonates on an almost genetic level for creatures such as we. This is just one of a set of deeply resonant metaphors: that life is a journey and a garden, a mission and an adventure, a building and a mountain climb, while love is, all at once, magic, madness, a rollercoaster and a flower to which we must tend — these mappings, which we use on an intimate level to make sense of our lives, spring deeply from our subconscious ways of producing conceptual-organizational-schemas that have success producing traction on reality, which consequently facilitates our movement forwards in the world, towards whatever awaits.
‘Whatever awaits’ is that multifaceted crystal the depths of which we struggle to divine and define from our profoundly fragmentary perspectives as shards of a crystal which has never been shattered. For creatures such as we, subjective sparks of curiosity, individual breaths of life, reality is always experienced through its tangibly discrete manifestations, i.e. ‘existence’ presents as a phenomenal world, that is, a world made up of ‘experience’ (which is in fact a subject-object splice of the strangest species). We can no longer extricate ourselves and stand outside the subject-object distinction which we have formulated to see our experience as it once was: primordial and undivided, undifferentiated and, consequently, of a cosmos infused with meaning. We can, however, continue to move towards a more integrated and embodied philosophical tradition that takes proper account of the transcendental unity of existence wherein the analytical operation of the mind is given its proper place and indeed put in that proper place, for good. The truth is, we cannot stand outside the distinction because it always came from the inside, and all our philosophizing will always ultimately ground out in some kind of ground, whether that be physicality or the transcendental mystery in itself. And isn’t that the joy of the puzzle of existence: to puzzle it out, and to walk in the desert for our forty long days. Will we ever know? We don’t know that either!
Imagine that you (and every other soul on Gaia) are a celestial archer. Each and every one of you is aiming towards the North Star — the brightest star in the sky — and firing their one and only arrow up towards the symbol of hope. When the arrow lands, it sticks fast in the fabric of space-time, and you are suddenly teleported body-and-mind to the location of the arrow, to sight the star and fire once again. However, just as in the case where one is trying to follow a rainbow to its end to find the pot of gold, from every new vantage point, your perspective on that star has changed — sometimes subtly, but sometimes massively — and the corresponding shift in your conceptual projection results in an iteratively updated overall trajectory for the arrow that becomes the path that you travel. In other words, as you continually shoot your shot towards the heavens, you procedurally upgrade not only your strategy for hitting the target, but also your conception of where the target is, as well as stranger notions such as what your target is and why you and it are intertwined in the way you always have been. You do not know why exactly you are shooting for the stars, except that legend has it that there is some mythical pot of gold hidden beyond the horizon.
In this connexion I cannot fail to mention the succinct and wonderfully illuminating book Zen in the Art of Archery.
Access to the art — and the master archers of all times are agreed in this — is only granted to those who are ‘pure’ in heart, untroubled by subsidiary aims.
Should one ask, from this standpoint, how the Japanese Masters understand this contest of the archer with himself, and how they describe it, their answer would sound enigmatic in the extreme. For them the contest consists in the archer aiming at himself — and yet not at himself, in hitting himself — and yet not himself, and thus becoming simultaneously the aimer and the aim, the hitter and the hit. Or, to use some expressions which are nearest the heart of the Masters, it is necessary for the archer to become, in spite of himself, an unmoved centre. Then comes the supreme and ultimate miracle: art becomes “artless”, shooting becomes not−shooting, a shooting without bow and arrow; the teacher becomes a pupil again, the Master a beginner, the end a beginning, and the beginning perfection.
A profound expression of a mysterious idea, that the archer and the target are somehow one and the same, and that there is some kind of non-personal participation in your success which is merely facilitated by your inner poise and tranquillity. One way of interpreting the book that was quite resonant throughout my reading was a notion that if the archer could sink within himself and find his own inner centre, then the arrow would inevitably find the centre of the target. Significantly, there is a spiritual dimension to the teaching outlined in the book which is not unlike the concept in alchemy of the purification of the soul of the alchemist through the repeated labours of his laboratory work trying to refine the prima materia and produce a philosopher’s stone.
“Your arrows do not carry,” observed the Master, “because they do not reach far enough spiritually. You must act as if the goal were infinitely far off. For master archers it is a fact of common experience that a good archer can shoot further with a medium−strong bow than an unspiritual archer can with the strongest. It does not depend on the bow, but on the presence of mind, on the vitality and awareness with which you shoot. In order to unleash the full force of this spiritual awareness, you must perform the ceremony differently: rather as a good dancer dances. If you do this, your movements will spring from the centre, from the seat of right breathing. Instead of reeling off the ceremony like something learned by heart, it will then be as if you were creating it under the inspiration of the moment, so that dance and dancer are one and the same. By performing the ceremony like a religious dance, your spiritual awareness will develop its full force.”
The archer projects himself into his bow and arrow just as the alchemist projects himself into the chemicals he is trying to transmute, and they become an extension of his natural being: the next goal is to figure out how to project himself into his target and embody it as well. If he manages to bring together the unity of existence within his own subjective being, and erase the lines which he himself imposes upon the world as if it were bits and pieces which must be put together by the mind of man, then and only then will he be able to shoot with a surety and a power that transcends mere physicality. This becomes possible because in the process of training oneself to return to the centre within where everything is as it should be and all things are one, the archer himself becomes both the target and the bow and the arrow, and to bring them into alignment in physical reality is a simple act of realization that they are already and always were connected to begin with. By way of his merging the practical discipline of archery with his spiritual discipline, and by his utilization of the same set of metaphors to characterize both, he has infused the art of archery with his spiritual power, his mana. His capacity to hit the inner target inevitably manifests itself in outward confirmations.
Do not forget that even in Nature there are correspondences which cannot be understood, and yet are so real that we have grown accustomed to them, just as if they could not be any different. I will give you an example which I have often puzzled over. The spider dances her web without knowing that there are flies who will get caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam, gets caught in the net without knowing what lies in store. But through both of them ‘It’ dances, and inside and outside are united in this dance. So, too, the archer hits the target without having aimed; more I cannot say.
You and the rest of the souls on Gaia cannot see each other while drawing and releasing, but when you rest in stillness for a moment, you can see the arrows of your entire species lighting up the inky blackness like luminescent rain. In moments of truly deep silence and stillness however, the individuality of the arrows becomes ephemeral, and all you can perceive is their inter-connective trajectory towards a higher ideal which recedes into the horizons and transcends your every conception: The Good itself, that ever-receding North Star. Rather than a storm of arrows, one sees a celestial spear which is the consolidated living spirit of the species, an essence that would otherwise be distributed in individuality. In these moments of profound tranquillity, if you are exceptionally perceptive, you may notice that there are, distant though they may be, astronomical arrows of other colours — all the hues of the rainbow in fact — glimmering in the distance. They are difficult to see, almost translucent, and they are all pointed towards the sky.
You see, to speak plainly for a second, I am a firm believer in the reality of morality: in fact, it is self-evident to me. I see the star in the sky so clearly, and I know that the closer I get the more I will see how far I have yet to travel; yet I do not deny the star because it is so elusive, but rather I see in its ephemerality the confirmation of its transcendental origin. We evolved to favour strategies which were compatible both with the goals constitutive of our lineage and with the actual mechanical constraints of the physical world in which we are all ensnared together. There is an essential core of moral thought and behaviour which we all know and feel as a duty, even if we do not wish to honour or admit of it, and every philosophy of life which is conducive to flourishing grows organically out of such a common core of life-supporting principles. Every single species of subjective life form will have the same experience, of a rising up out of the darkness, of an enlightenment which consists of a flowing spiral of growth and development — a flowering.
We rise up out of the darkness, like the lotus flower which is the principal expression of the unalome, and we rise through higher and higher intellectual and moral spheres until we can see, as clear as day, that we have a duty to be compassionate and to have empathy for other living, thinking and feeling creatures, and that we have a responsibility to give other animals the benefit of the doubt, and assume sentience where possible rather than the inverse. Part of the painful process of enlightenment, which is a simultaneous burning away and lifting up, is to recognize the primacy of harmony in the value hierarchy of evolved and civilized creatures, a harmony which is ever-expanding in its scope and in potential implications and applications. In other words, I believe the highest moral good is synonymous with a striving towards harmony with all other life forms in existence within this mysterious and unfathomable universe of ours, as well as an attempt to make our modes of living and thinking, or the song which is our life philosophy, as resonant as possible with the actual acoustics of the world.
And so your noble race of celestial archers, if you are both lucky and brave, continues to shoot for the stars and before you know it you have moved so far beyond the wildest dreams of your ancestors that if they somehow came across you, they would think you gods. As your powers grow, so too does your responsibility, and you continue to aim towards the highest point and the brightest star, never ceasing in your striving to go beyond, plus ultra. My thinking is that the better your hive-mind enlightenment species got at creating quiet, the more one would see that every other species of life, every other hue of the rainbow, are all, in their own way, reaching up towards the same star, playing along in their own section of the symphony to the universal song. All those arrows from all those celestial spheres making all that beautiful music as they soar towards the stars, all those lovers of life reaching towards a point of brilliance which transcends each and every one of us and which recedes into infinity… and beyond.
It would be like a multidimensional Eiffel tower, or a fractal snowflake of exquisite grace. Perhaps it might look like a matrix of light. Each and every one of those instances of individuality, those expressions of existence, would all (in my idealistic mind) naturally grow towards a transcendental and truly universal existential strategy which organically creates new interconnections and facilitates a co-operative attempt to flourish despite the hardships and tragedies of life. In this one phrase, ‘to infinity and beyond’, I think Buzz Lightyear manages to summarize what Carl Jung would have called the religious function of the soul of man. It is as if the very essence and fabric of existence is reaching up, through and beyond itself, towards something transcendental; as if the perpetually unfolding flower of potentiality which the Greeks once called Entelechy were a process of collaboration between the individual and the universal. It is beyond that we have always wished to go, always wanting to know more and to be more.
I don’t know about you, but I’m proud to want to be more, and I think that I probably always will be.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed this little piece of philosophical prose.
A couple of notes:
Zen and the Art of Archery is a penetrating and articulate account of the intersection between Zen Buddhist ideas and a practical discipline such as swordsmanship, painting, flower arrangement or archery by Eugen Herrigel.
If you are intrigued by my remarks on metaphor, here are a few works which have been influential in shaping my emerging thoughts on the subject:
The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur, Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and Philosophy in the Flesh by the same.
If you’d be interested in learning a bit more about my own understanding of metaphor, check out this essay I wrote for the Medium Writer’s Challenge.
Have a great day :)
