The Shieldedness of the Open

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker with a picture of a Native American man on it.  It said "The Earth doesn't belong to us.  We belong to the Earth."

These days, I feel like I belong more than ever.

I want so badly to belong to my situation, to my world.  I no longer want to set myself above and beyond that space that I occupy.

I want to be, in a fuller sense than I've ever been.

I want to feel what I'm feeling.  Nothing else.

This is something that I've come to through therapy, through meditation.

But I also have some powerful intellectual referents.  Heidegger, in particular, has me super jazzed.

Unfortunately, I have a strained relationship with the intellectual end of this feeling.  In the past, I've lost myself in my intellect.  I've let my writing be disconnected from reality.  I've let my writing become masturbatory.  Pleasurable, but disconnected from reality.

These days, I really want to continue my intellectual development.  But I'm more committed than ever to practice.

In his essay, "What Are Poets For?", Heidegger lays down some real shit.

The essay revolves around the problem of technological nihilism: that we are addicted to scientific and objective forms of thought.  These objective forms of thought, he claims, have left us disconnected from reality and unable to access the truth of Being.

Being, for Heidegger, has something to do with being in the 'Open'.  The Open is something that animals exist fully in.  But something that humans have lost touch with through our modes of thought.  Through science we have managed to place ourselves above and outside of the Open.  We have managed to objectivize the world and ourselves, turning everything into raw material for some greater human plan.

Our relationship with abstract, objective thought, has plunged us into a too willful willing.  We no longer feel the fullness of Being, the simple unity of the fourfould, as Heidegger might say.

We no longer dwell in order to build, we simply build without a sense of dwelling.

Paradoxically, Heidegger believes that by situating ourselves in opposition to nature, the Open, we have become unshielded.  That our tendency to think objectively, to manipulate people and the world, leaves us more vulnerable to the pain of Being.

Somehow, there is more shieldedness in the Open.

Somehow, accepting the vulnerability of the Open makes us more shielded.

This idea resonates so powerfully with me.

I want so badly to know myself, to express myself, and to be known by others.

And this type of knowing does not happen through objective modes of thought.  It happens in the Open.  It happens in the unity of the fourfold.

True strength comes from vulnerability.

Shieldedness comes from the Open.

I feel it.

Yet I'm trying to write about it.

I'm not sure if that is a problem, but I don't feel like it is.