Quiet gratitude...

I wrote this morning that I have been struggling with my paper for the forthcoming Workshop in Boston. I write now, in the late evening, with some measure of satisfaction and gratitude. Gratitude is the only proper word, for the insights that are not under the command of our will, for their arrival, their giftedness....

Not that there have been major insights. But it has been a day of quiet, mostly flowing, writing. I experienced the goodness of having small summaries of the main points hanging out in print. I suppose that was the point of the old schede system. And once again, the importance of not being kanjoos, of generously printing out (despite the damage to the trees!), because insight calls for the phantasm!

Also the importance of having more or less worked out what seems to be a workable scheme. Then, with the schede / printouts in front of you, you can read slowly, ruminate, pommel things into shape, insert.

So today I found myself wanting to modify the three part scheme I had worked out for De Smet on Sankara. The first part of quite okay, not really problematic, the part about Sankara's stage of meaning and mode of expression, though I found it clicking rather well with what I had written / suggested last year: Sankara is really in the 'mixed mode' that is neither purely symbolic nor yet fully systematic.

The second part really needed modification or expansion, and that because of the introductory part of my paper, or better the overall aim of my paper: Retrieving Good Work. Such retrieval involved attempting to read De Smet / Sankara from generalized method. How do I do that? I am just falling back, without too much fuss, on the little notes I had made already. So I incorporated, without being too ambitious, notes on Sankara on experience/ consciousness, understanding, judging; on being; on objectivity. Now that I write that, perhaps I must try to see whether I can do something similar also about meaning, given the importance that vakya / sentence / proposition plays in Sankara's exegesis. ...

So that's where I am, and its a good feeling.