The term "contemplation" is often confused today with the posture of the observer separated from what they contemplate. But is it possible? If we consider that nothing can exist without "being with," if we agree that from biology to the cosmos everything is interactive, then contemplation itself can only be a meeting, movement, and relationship.
From this quick contextualization of contemplation emerges a more fundamental question: Who contemplates? In my opinion, contemplation cannot be detached from the notion of identity, which is itself related to that of being human. So, I will try to taste the flesh of my human reality to feel the flavor of contemplation more vividly.
Like a koan, those cases in Zen that seek to open the field of experience rather than knowledge, it is in the discomfort of my mystery that I perceive almost as arrogance that I want to surrender to the process of contemplation to answer this question. I want to try to enter the landscape that I offer myself, taking the risk of liquefying in the moving reflection of what is being looked at...
I don't know what it means to be human; I don't even know what it means to live! And with the intuition of my ignorance, a great gust carries me away and takes me to another space. That of a child lying down a mountain, that of two dogs playing in a fountain, that of flower petals dancing in the wind. I don't know what a human being is, but I recognize life when I see it, and I know what it means to vibrate. I recognize the sound, the wave, the dance, the movement.
To enter the flesh, to step out of definitions, to extract myself from what I think I know, to escape from a printed (in the sense of reproduced) map to rewrite at every step what it means to be human, to break down the boundaries between a human and a chair, to explode the prison of linear time of which I am an accomplice, to dare, just dare. Take a step to the side, get lost, forget oneself, and let the world define me.
To answer this question clearly would ultimately be a proof of my inhumanity because all I know is that I am (S) much larger and at the same time much smaller than the definition I could have of what I am. I also know that I can only be in "being with" because a human being exists when they enter into a relationship, when they are in contact, a human being does not exist alone, it is impossible.
They are made up of the cup with which they eat as much as the morning star, as much as the surrounding aggressiveness or benevolence. They are made and exist through shared smiles, the objects they use, write on, and what they eat. No possible definition, no ideal, no territory is their own, and yet they exist.
A human being is a landscape, an opening in which a perpetual transformation occurs from the millions of contacts, a magma of moving intersections influenced by and influencing others and only exists as they believe to be in the context of a photo, never in dynamic reality. No fixation possible. No reality to rest upon. Just the experience.
Contemplation cannot be separated from the human experience, which realizes its life in the very act of contemplating and allowing itself to be contemplated. It is to make what is contemplated exist in the gaze of what is contemplated and to become oneself the dynamic wheel of life.
Cooking, eating, washing one's bowls.
It is this experiential movement that we find in the Zen tradition expressed in its etymology: Dyana, Dya: silent contemplation, porous presence, absorption, and na: movement;
Dyana has become "zen" in Japanese, the dynamic contemplation lived through zazen, the foundation of dynamic contemplation. The one who, by opening herself to all that happens, makes it happen. On a cushion, in the kitchen, on the subway, next to a tree. In the reflection of the eye The infinite space of what we look at and let ourselves be seen. We exist Eternally