Words – Part 3
With words, who can link the Buddha to Shakespeare to Keats? Our Nobel Laureate poet Louise Gluck, that’s who.
A tenet of Buddhism is non-self (anatta) – this regrettably is misunderstood as no-self which, of course, is exactly wrong. Self is the one thing we can be certain of,…..our supreme difficulty is exploring outside-our-self with an sense of curiosity and sympathy.
Ms. Gluck writes of Keats’ genius, “…..he refused to value what he did not believe, and he did not believe what he could not feel.” Further, “…..he advocated the opposite of egotistical self-awareness and self-cultivation,…..rather, the negative capability he felt in Shakespeare,….of suspending judgment in order to report faithfully, a capability of submission, a willingness to annul the self.”
I think that is what the Buddha intended – a collective consciousness borne of dialogue and kindness, rather than no-self. A challenge.
Two inspiring attachments, low-tech and high-tech, yet the same puissance: a) the simplest, deepest human connection saves the newly born, b) everything we do to newborns (in the hospital/clinic/home) is registered in the phantasmagoric, exhilarant tour de force we call the developing brain. And, wouldn’t it be terrific if every manuscript had a ‘Graphical Abstract’ as Ellis et al provide?,……our hippocampi would activate.
Joe Kaempf, MD
Oregon Representative, District 8
Portland, OR
Volume 13, Number 17