Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Subjects in Mirror May be Larger than they Appear

The man who says "I" doesn't choose the mouth which says it. --Wittgenstein

Okay, what's that supposed to mean?

Well, first of all, it goes to the miracle of subjectivity, through which each of us can honestly say "I" without starting an argument over who patented the name.

Only a human being -- or person, rather -- can say I AM. (A human being is a type of person, whereas a person is not a type of human being, just as "life" is not restricted to biology, nor substance restricted to physical matter.)

Even leaving Jesus aside, it would appear that I AM represents a collision between the highest and the most inward, or the deepest and most expansive.

This is the essential experiential realization of the Upanishads, an "illumination accompanied by the profoundest penetrative insight, when the mind, at a flashpoint," Iquates "the identity of the absolute subjectivity behind the objective world" and "the inmost ground of that subjectivity which is its Effect..." (Davie).

Yes, our I is an effect; but it is not essentially an effect of matter, of culture, of history (although these things may of course affect it). Rather, in essence it can only be the effect of another I.

This firstandlast guffah-ha! experience represents not a union, but a realization, "of the ultimate with the most intimate," whereby we apprehend the vertical reality of a "single axis, running from microcosmos to macrocosmos, on which the whole creation turns" (ibid).

Thus we make the final deuscovery and solve the last equation -- that in the selfsame text "outside ourselves we decipher at astronomical distances" what is "written on a microscopic scale in the further depths of the heart" (Claudel, in Davie).

Outside in, brightside up, last one first, I-I, sir, this is THAT!, etc.

At this point the only thing left to say is: Can I buy some pot from you?

I've got something better: some unfiltered, high potency Eckhart. Because it's not just a Hindu thing.

The Meister speaks of placing a mirror before the sun: "The sun sends forth its rays both from the ground of the sun and from the [mirror], and thereby loses nothing." The sun's reflection in the mirror is the sun, and yet, "the mirror is what it is."

"Thus it is with God," who "is in the soul..., and yet he is not the soul." Just as the mirror is still the mirror, the soul is still the soul.

Yes, the light is the reflection and God the creature; but the reverse is not true: the reflection is not the sun and the creature is not God. It is the distinction between identity vs. inclusion, respectively.

You might say that God is at one with us, but that we are included in God. To the extent that we are at one with God, it can only be a posterior realization of his prior at-one-ment with us. Thus it is our task to at-one for God's at-onement.

Or is it God's task -- a task he has set before himsoph -- to at-one for our at-two-ment?

This would be the Christian premise, that God atones for humanity by at-one-ing with humanity on the most intimate terms imaginable -- by transitioning through our every evolutionary-developmental stage from blastocyst to embryo to fetus to infant to child to adolescent to adult, and every phase in between.

Recall the wise crack from a few days ago, that Eternity obtains in time reversed divinity. A mirror reflects the object, only in a reversed image.

Just so, time -- developmental time, specifically -- reflects the eternal subject, only in reverse, as exemplified in Jesus' temporal journey from cell to hell and back, or from womb to tomb and beyond.

So remember: subject in mirror may be larger than it appears.

The End. Or Beginning, rather.

My mind has often dwelt on the enigma of "I."
Why is it I who thinks himself "I,"
And not another? Why is the world
Divided into many thousand mirrors? --Frithjof Schuon, I-ness

And

We are Ones again back before the beginning,
Before old nobodaddy committed wholly materimany
And exwholed himsoph into a world of sorrow and ignorance.
Back upin a timeless
With the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made,
A Light no longer dispersed and refracted
Through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.
Back at the still point between the vertical and horizontal,
Where eternity pierces the present moment
And we are unborn
Again. --The book of I Still Can't Believe they Published It

21 comments:

ge said...

'SELF'

'I have been asking myself the same question for an entire eternity, without obtaining an answer. Is there any reason to believe that anything survives death? The "ego", for example? Can it die? If the "ego" dies, everything comes to an end with it. One day you explained to me that if the "ego" didn't exist, there would be no world. If a yogi, for example, had stripped himself of his "ego" in his profoundest state of samadhi, there would be no one there to know that he had been in samadhi. Or perhaps he didn't know that he was in samadhi? Because there is individuality without ego-consciousness; it exists even in a flower, a stone. " A stone is a stone because it has no ego-consciousness, " said Meister Eckhart.
Without consciousness, without "ego", there can be no individuation. There is persona but not personality. And the "ego", this "ego" I feel myself to be, that only I am, how can it die? If it dies, the world comes to an end, because how can "I" know that it will go on without "me", when "I" die? Only because people tell me so, because someone assures me it is so, while I am still here. I learn that the world goes on after me. And it is "I" who hears it, always "I". Ah, but if I really do die, then everything comes to an end, even the world. And I cannot escape from this. There is no possible way out for my "ego". I can only think and feel the following: when I disappear, if ever I do disappear, someone in eternity will again feel himself to be "me", exactly as I do now. And this "I", who feels like this, will be "I" myself, just as if nothing had ceased to exist; because in the immense interval, after a whole eternity, if there is no "I" - this "I" - there is no consciousness, so that time also comes to an end. A moment, a sigh, a nothing. The disappearance and resurrection of the world. The sleep, the repose of the Gods. The Eternal Return.
'I have come here to consult you, to talk to you, to think with you. How can I know that you really exist, that you are also "I", that you feel yourself to be an "I", "your-I"? Only because I hear you tell me so. And it could well be a projection of myself or a splitting of myself in two, like all the rest, words that I am saying to myself, questions and answers that I am putting to myself, a monologue in front of a mirror in which I am looking at myself. At the end of his dramatic life, Nietzsche also had discovered this - so they tell me - and he became all people in one, at one and the same time, succeeding in escaping from the circle into madness. But did he really escape?'

Unknown said...

OT -- this is mushroom -- in case anybody wonders what happened. Google blew me away for "unusual activity". Not exactly a huge loss to the blog world. I refuse to give my phone number to restore.

ge said...

For those of us not able to make it through the holiday without knowing for sure if there may be a female equivalent artist to the visionary psychedelic grids & subtle body mapping art of Alex Grey...
there is
thank Goddess!

John Lien said...

First they came for the fungi, and I said nothing....

Unknown said...

So a mirror is just a mirror, it depends on what it reflects.

ge said...

but a mirror's mirrorness is miraculous perfect and useful precisely because it retains no qualities or reflections itself; hence a pretty great metaphor for Mind in its pure state, or a goal of meditation... for mas:
aqui, 4th para--->

mushroom said...

I'm back. Google and I reached an understanding.

julie said...

Mush, that sucks. I'm with you, though; I can't think of a single good reason to give Google my cell number. Did you lose your blog? I hope you keep it up somewhere else.

Van Harvey said...

Mushroom, been there done that, took a couple weeks I think to get it all back.

Back up.

Which reminds me... haven't done that in a while.

Van Harvey said...

BTW, a fine lead up to fireworks today, Hillsdale College's Larry Arnn has a video on The Declaration and the Constitution, and you can't celebrate it right without understanding it... so... celebrate July 4th Right!

ge said...

solamente en los estados unidos de los 'sixties'

a VERY early indie psych masterpiece
with the speech-impeded singer/leader Tom Rapp [later to become a civil rights lawyer and now an accountant...who early on beat Bob Zimmerman in a talent show]. I roomed with a guy for 2 years who had this first time ever seen ESP-disk in his collection circa '66

Gagdad Bob said...

Speaking of Zimmerman, no post today, but I recommend that everyone check out the cross examination of the state medical evaluator at 1:00 eastern over at legal insurrection. The guy is a ridiculous assclown, so it's going to be epic (use the NBC feed at the bottom, without commentary. And check out Andrew Branca's live tweets to get up to speed -- very funny).

JP said...

Apparently the MSM lost their way in the Zimmerman case. They seem both bored and confused. There aren't even going to be any riots when he's acquitted.

I'm not even sure that Martin's family can win the *civil* trial.

Anyhow, re marijuana:

I just spent the last half hour basically saying to a client "if you don't stop smoking marijuana, I am going to drop you just like your last attorney dropped you."

An absolute PTSD/depression/anxiety mess. Can't wait to read the psych records.

ge said...

wow what a song/voice! intro'd to her just today, appropriate tune re old good America:
Iris Dement's OUR TOWN

meanwhile i know many will have a hard time making it to sunday without seeing this
Psychedelic Da!

ge said...

TS Eliot's Greatest Hits

Ah! 4:00-5:05, the incommunicable gnosis ecstasy vouchsafed

ge said...

So, the middleweight underdog who wins UFC last night says 'it's surreal'...

...Passenger who escaped SF wreck says 'It was surreal!'

Mass shooting survivor---'Everything was in slow motion, surreal'

Hey yo! How about some other art histoire refs!

"It was Pollockian to the extreme!'

"It seemed like a Fauves exhibit on steroids"

"Then things became pointillistic, I mean I expected to see Georges Seurat with his smock and palette around the corner!'

"Then the killer reloaded and it felt like a Warhol 'Happening'!"

= more like it

Van Harvey said...

OT, bite me.

Ephrem Antony Gray said...

Mirrors need to be clean and whole

Christian morality in a nutshell

Next!

JP said...

I think we need either a new post or an open thread.

Gagdad Bob said...

Should be a new post tomorrow. Just a matter of the biology of sleep, i.e., when I return ashore from the night sea journey.

ge said...

You may thank me one day for this intro., if it is one
GREG BROWN
less well-known than he should be/will be...married to Iris DeMent

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