This post is the fourth in the series of elucidations on the purpose of this blog and the subjective position of our project.

“When this place too is broken through [–] there the everyday encounters between all men are something of infinite freshness, pervaded with infinite fragrance” (Nishitani 2004, 51). 

When a subject has broken through one’s ego and transdescended into the midst of the world and sentient beings one can be truly open and hence curious. As the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani expresses in truly beautiful words, when the subject is curious towards the world, every encounter is fresh and contains infinite fragrance. Moreover, in this infinite freshness the subject engages in spiritual divertissement and by one’s very being starts to make poetry. Indeed, this poetry is not a poetry of language and human made concepts, but a poetry of “the very depths of our being and the being of all things”, composed of “actual things themselves” and “of the words that all things themselves recite”. 

Thus, the curiosity of spiritual divertissement and poetry of being is openness towards all that exists. By this openness, this curiosity, sentient beings and worldly phenomena speak to us. Through this language of being the ignorantly wise can learn from everything that exists, not just inside the classroom or from textbooks. More so, curiosity exposes us to see things differently, and as such, it even precedes imagination (Lewis 2012, 111–112).

Curiosity does not only enable one to learn from different and from conventionally unlikely held sources, but it also enables and encourages one to be truly compassionate and thus to truly to promote equality among beings. Curiosity is therefore essential to any democratic and equal being. This compassion and this equality reaches even the furthest recesses of the dark night of ignorance. In other words, the subject does not indiscriminate, because the subject transcesdends into a state of non-discrimination: The subject does not try to abstain from discrimination, but becomes such a being that does not discriminate. Therefore, curiosity enables us to open, even towards beings and opinions, which are foreign or contradictory to our own.

To be sure, being in a state of non-discrimination is a rather difficult state to be in, yet at the same time it is also a profoundly easy state. It is easy because in this state of being, one can always fall back on the universal compassion to guide one’s actions. Universal compassion is an immovable ground to stand upon because, ultimately, it is grounded on the experience of infinite freshness and of infinite fragrance – experiences which invigorate one’s being and which even in emptying the ego make that emptiness a fullness. Can there ever be an experience or state more beautiful?