Stranger Sutra version 27
Author: Glenn Wallis
Wallis, G. (2020, May 20). Stranger Sutra. https://speculativenonbuddhism.com/2020/05/20/stranger-sutra/
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Stranger Sutra
Preamble
The stranger proclaims: To you, World, I refuse. The stranger identifies, the stranger resists, alienating representations.
GW: The cap-World is…constructed.
AD objects: but we cannot have unmediated experience of the real world.
GW: Yes. There is no outside of subjectivity, world-view, ideology, VIEW. The point is then to construct the a subject (etc.) explicitly.
AD: So the point is to resist others’ constructions, but to assert one’s own. Consciously. Intelligently.
GW: That is resisting alienating representations.
AS: so there is no non-alienating representation.
GW: They are alienating if they are alienating of your position.
AD: Yes, even an anarchist system can harden.
GW: Resisting—even this text and practice
GW Everyone is always deciding what the human is, how they should think, act, speak. The ‘stranger’ names a kind of subject that resists such capture that is constantly going on all around them. As you start living in this manner, you become estranged from…Buddhism, Democratic Party, other people in your milieu who attach to these things. But you are still there.
ML: following Hegel, the small-world is what resists or is recalcitrant against the World.
The stranger proclaims: To you, World, I give. By means of interminable negation, the stranger reinvigorates being and thought in the face of radical immanence, in the face of empty reality, in the face of the axiomatic, in the face of para-zero, in the face of the void, the quasi, the apophatic, the desert, the dark night, the philofictional Real.
The stranger transfuses the symptom, exposed in the yearning embrace of the curative fantasy of ideological self-sufficiency, into a sovereign discernment for going forward.
Transfusion occurs in subjective submersion. We are speaking here of the decomposition that precedes bioremediation. We are speaking here of the inalienable poverty that begets the stranger.
Postulate
Sunk in inalienable poverty, the stranger emerges fit for the clash with Hell.
Practice: Decomposition with Breathing
It would be useful to provide a rationale underlying these five foci. Maybe the five skandhas?—but not in a clearly recognizable form.
This comment was deleted by Jean Goodwin at Feb 01 2021 8:39PM.
In this section, some of the instructions stress an action the contemplator is doing:
knowing
obsesrving
connecting/letting go
But other instructions refer to states:
aware (of) (twice)
sensitive to
cognizant (?) of
So are we doing something, or being something?
Now, go to an isolated place. Sit down, and straighten your body. Establishing awareness right where you are, breathe in, simply aware, then breathe out, simply aware. Continue:
I breathe in, knowing I am breathing in. I breathe out, knowing I am breathing out.
I breathe in, sensitive to the entire body. I breathe out, sensitive to the entire body.
I breathe in, aware of emotion. I breathe out, aware of emotion.
“Emotion” seems a bit blunt, plus it’s just one word, breaking the pattern of two word objects.
This is a tricky matter. In the original text, this comes in the second tetrad, the “vedana” section. The aim there is to recognize what occurs when bodily contact and mental formation interact. Is this a “feeling,” a “sensation,” an emotion"? Buddhist psychology does not have a category of emotion in the sense of a pure interior feeling. So, phenomenologically, what is the focus of this section?
I breathe in, cognizant of mental oscillation. I breathe out, cognizant of mental oscillation.
AS comments: “oscillation” is binary—like a pendulum swinging back and forth. Is thought like that? Or is it a quantum frenetic activity, things popping into existence, zapping about, popping out.
GW comments: As in breathing, or in Hindu cosmology. KS: "Spanda is the original, primordial subtle vibration that arises from the dynamic interplay of the passive and the creative polarizations of the Absolute, and that by unfolding itself into the energetic process of differentiation bringing forth the whole of creation.”
I breathe in, observing the arising of the breath. I breathe out, observing the dissolution of the breath.
I breathe in, connecting. I breathe out, letting go.
Warnings
Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person and is of benefit to society. But only if it remains an insufficient practice. When taken as sufficient, it conspires with the New Age Apocalypse. This is your first warning.
Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person and is of benefit to society. But only if it remains on the side of the living. When applied as a pharmakon for the imaginary plenitude of calm contemplation, it conspires with the Spiritual Death Drive. This is your second warning.
3. Decomposition with breathing is a complete waste of your time. Because truth lies in overarching tradition. By taking you away from happy labor of self-flagellating quest for perfection, it is a conspiracy of material Eros. This is your last chance.
2. Decomposition with breathing is a complete waste of your time. Because truth lies in overarching tradition. By taking you away from happy labor of self-flagellating quest for perfection, it is a conspiracy of material Eros. This is your last chance.
1. This is your second warning?
Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person
and is of benefit to society?
What does it mean to “be on the side of the living”?
Somehow, the more I thought about it, the more obvious it seems, though a concrete definition is, no doubt, elusive. I thought of the well-known Thoreau quote from Walden: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life.”
Autocommentary
Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person and is of benefit to society. It places the practitioner in the teeming ruin where person and World intersect and transfuse. The soil of this ruin is flush with fungal mycelia generating the energetic flows—biological, psychological, mythological, narratological, ideological—we call existence.
We vigorously apply a fiction: In the ruin of our practice unfolds a process of bioremediation. Through decomposition, contaminants are purged from the soil. Be clear! Remediation is not purification. Think, rather, quickening and augmentation of earth-incrusted organic matter.
That’s it. And then the stranger steps out from the ruin. Toward what end? To struggle against the powers of the World. To clash with Hell.
Kublai Khan said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.” And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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