Autumn still

It's been a funny old season as until a few days ago it was mild. Then there was snow on my car one morning! And after that, cold, but blue skies, and still the feel of autumn rather than winter.

I keep thinking about the question of 'Form'. From a non-dual perspective, I understand it's effectively 'an illusion'. That all is really one and thereby the same and so one can commune with a tree or a robin or a muntjac or a person by ignoring the illusion of difference.

This doesn't satisfy me. Partly, I think awareness of difference is not bad. I like this from Ralph Acampora's Corporal Compassion:

When we conceive the other in terms of related otherness, their difference is potentially valued positively, as possessing unique or distinctive characteristics that are admirable in their

own right. Furthermore, a perspective of related otherness evolves into a more basic sense of broad relation beyond those of one’s specific kind; it often focuses on shared characteristics and possibilities rather than on marking out polarities or irreducible opposition. Deviant similitude registers when another being is viewed as somebody or thing who/which should be similar in kind yet manifest differently insofar as they fail to manifest the characteristics

considered to be normal, healthy, appropriate, or advantageous to other members of the same kind. Such an other is regarded as an irregular entity whose being is characterized by its abnormality in relation to “us” or to “me.” Out of these experiences arise certain cognitive attitudes - what Habermas would call “epistemic interests” and Foucault would call “power-knowledge” alignments—that configure opposing ontologies. Conceived in terms of related otherness, the alien is deferentially understood as first-rank Other. When the other takes the cast of deviant similitude, it is conceived as an aberrant freak, mistakenly dominated as second-rate Same.

So I am suggesting that there is value in acknowledging the other as a first-rate member of the type they are.

And I think differences are real. I did a shamanic journey to give myself the space and freedom I needed to think this out and, behind a waterfall, I found an octopus. In dreaming, they are happy in non-saline conditions, it seems. I asked the 'pus and he said:

All beings and things arise from the enmeshed web or matrix or ground of the all, but all emerge as themselves: unique one-of-a-kinds, even if members of a species or the divided progeny of an amoeba. The mind-body, body-mind, form-spirit of each has arisen from that particular spot at that particular time and where the conditions of that part of the complex and ever changing enmeshment are just as they are right then. And that mind-body has what it has and no more and no less. And that body-mind is particular in its sensing and physicality and beingness. And that form-spirit becomes as it does through the ongoing and always changing enmeshments of the life it has and the relations it has and what it absorbs and what it excretes. And you can't say that the mind of all is shared, despite all minds emerging as waves in the same sea because they are waves and particles and the particle part is particular and is body.

So, there you have it.

This is a sort of enmeshment.

I am reading difficult books. this one is by the philosopher David Wood:

Thinking Plant Animal Human is an adventure in strangeness—­ soliciting,

noticing, bearing witness to the strange—­ as the tectonic plates of our

dwelling and thinking shudder and shift. Is the sense of strangeness just

a symptom of displacement, in transition to a fully fledged decentering of

the human—­ something from which we might hope to recover? My gut

feeling says no. We cannot avoid concepts, habits, and a taste for the famil-

iar. But we know that the Real will always escape our grasp. Having a nose

(and an ear, and an eye) for the strange, for the unfamiliar, the disturbing,

the unexpected, keeps us honest and in touch with the deeper strangeness

that we each are. The hierarchical tradition that ranks plants, animals, and

humans is crumbling. Let us welcome the sparkle of a new dawn. Crea-

tures of the world unite: we have nothing to lose but the great chain of

being!

Here the blackbird emerges.