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