Just by linking Carl Sagan’s eloquent little Pale Blue Dot to the teachings of Gautama Buddha, James Ure’s Buddhist Blog brings out the buddhism inherent both in Sagan’s words and in the imagery of the Earth from space. That imagery (as I’ve discussed before here and here) is multivalent, but Sagan’s spin on it — the pale blue dot as “the aggregate of our joy and suffering” on which “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” — deepens its ability to carry useful meaning. That ability will one day exhaust itself, if not turn into its opposite, but for now I don’t think it has. “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [. . .] the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner [. . .] Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.”
In claiming there’s an “inherent buddhism” in the image, here’s what I mean: By “buddhism,” uncapitalized and thus not specific to a “religion” (such as big-B Buddhism), I mean the recognition of interconnected and codependent origination of all things — i.e. the recognition that what’s primary is not subjectness (“me,” “you,” et al.) or objectness (this thing or that thing) with any inherent self-existence of their own, but rather the process by which subjects and objects arise and emerge, a process persistent in its creativity (emergence into novelty), its desiring-production (Deleuze/Guattari’s term), its forward motion. This recognition comes accompanied by a feeling of sharedness, giving rise to compassion for all those entities that arise and perish alongside us.
And by “inherent” I mean something like what Deleuze means by the “virtual” and Whitehead means by the “extensive continuum,” a field of potential out of which emerge the occasions of becoming, or bits of experience, that make up the world. (Whitehead’s worldview is panexperientialist, a view of the world made up of “experience all the way down.”) This buddhism, as I’m calling it — though I could also refer to it as a process ecotheology (Whitehead was a Christian) or a paganism (in the sense used by many neo-Pagans today) or a process-relational, liberationist social ontology, or something like that — is there as a distinct possibility that can be made actual or real when drawn out in that direction.
Capturing the sense of forward motion and affective solidarity of this kind of panexperientialist metaphysic, Whitehead writes: “The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. It is the flying dart of which Lucretius speaks, hurled beyond the bounds of the world.” Incidentally, it’s Whitehead who is largely responsible for the use of the word “creativity” in the way we now take for granted. (Thanks to Steven Meyer for pointing this out and for highlighting this particular quote in his introduction to the special issue of Configurations on “Whitehead Now.”)
For background on the buddhism (capitalized or not) and on the means, or one set of means — and perhaps the best we have available — for internalizing that recognition, I highly recommend Lutz, Dunne, and Davidson’s state-of-the-art overview of Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness from the Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled [. . .] the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner [. . .]”
Perhaps he mentions it, I did not follow the link, but the image reference is not Buddha, but Christianity. Inadvertantly or not, the thought here turns to Dante’s Paradiso:
“The small patch that makes us all so fierce”
Some brief thoughts:
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/paradiso-22151-laiuola-che-ci-fa-tanto-feroci/
http://kvond.wordpress.com/2008/12/07/a-touch-more-on-laiuola-che-ci-fa-tanto-feroci/
Thanks for this wonderful (& resonant) reference, Kevin. Sagan’s “small stage” also made me think of Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage…” The theatrical imagery is perhaps more European (though I wouldn’t say Christian) than Buddhist, but the visuality of Dante’s gaze down onto this “patch of earth” is a good reminder that it didn’t take the Gemini/Apollo/Sputnik missions for us to look down onto the planet — poets, among others (and perhaps shamans in their imaginal spirit-travels above the earth, as Paul Devereux hypothesizes), had been doing this for centuries. Indian mythology seems particularly rich in that type of thing.
The interesting bit for me is that Dante seems to be suggesting that this “patch of earth that makes us here so fierce” is somehow responsible for our fierceness – though I don’t know if that’s intended in the original, or if it’s meant ironically perhaps. That doesn’t seem a very Buddhist concept, but in poetry (which is how I prefer to treat religion) everything’s is allowed, the goal being an expanded perception of reality rather than an adequate, accurate, or complete representation of it.
Yes, though there is debate about the translation – it is not clear if he intends a reference to the small round threshing floor – Dante does seem to mean that it is the very smallness of the Earth that generates our fierceness. It could mean that the smallness of our planet in a certain sense makes us blind to the great magnitudes that lies beyond us. Dante is at Gemini and must be amazed at the Beatitude of the vision. There is very much the sense that the vastness has relieve his own fierceness (or that of the Inferno). In this way it seems that the Finitude (actual and conceptual) itself is that which forces us together in acute, “rivers of blood” manners.
It is amazing that Dante, centuries before the telescope, and even further from space travel, has such an astronomical vision, the kind of thing we might feel when we look at images of the Earth taken from a distance in space.
It is amazing. It sounds very Neoplatonic – and Neoplatonic ideas (from Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, et al) would have filtered into medieval Christian, as well as Islamic and Jewish, thought, even though they weren’t more fully recovered until the early Renaissance. But the “rivers of blood” also suggests a strongly poetic sensitivity/sensibility very aware of the times (the later Crusades, etc.).
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