I feel it right to begin by acknowledging the very, very real and non-speculative experiences of horrific pain and suffering right now in the world. I intended this publication to be free of political statements. However, the manifestation of fruits of the abominable cults of war-making, greed, and the related and fabricated worship of the phantoms of national-identitarianism- as opposed to the sane and virtuous recognition of the reality of the commonality of the human race- these are as much a spiritual as they are a political question. I would also like to acknowledge the incredible bravery of a person who endured horrific self-inflicted death to act as a mirror revealing the great malice and wickedness being imposed on fellow human beings today in the name of profit and under the guise of a national and ethnic chauvinism and blood mysticism which should have been exorcised completely from the world after 1945, but which has taken on ever new forms, some with ghastly irony.
Speculation on Absence and Presence
That which underlies the conscious self (‘ego’ which is projection) is the unconscious non-self (ground of ego, place of emergence). The latter precedes, supports, and reabsorbs the former. The former is the world of differentiation, of subject and object, of the many, of duration and extension, of ‘this and that’, it is the world of the seer and the seen, the artist and the artwork, the creator and the created. The latter is both a ground and an opening point where awareness fuses with the undifferentiated, where subject and object are one, beyond duration and extension, where ‘this and that’ cease to be opposites, the realm preceding seer and seen, the creativity before creator and created, artistry as a principle before artist as person in relation to art.
It is the That, the ontological That which manifests as Presence, which remains unmanifest as Absence. All the dynamics, the dialectics of nature, of history, of thought, have their entire existence in a Present that is Presence proceeding from Absence, and to Absence returning: a holy Absence, a sacred Presence. That is the character of nature, dialectic, history, the intellect.
When we are born, it is the consciousness of the world being reborn: a newly awakened center of living consciousness. It is not that the world is any one person’s mind, rather every personal mind is a nodal point within the unity that is Consciousness/the World. Consequently, each phase of consciousness in personal experience, waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, is an instance of the world waking, dreaming, in dreamless sleep. Death is the substratum of unconsciousness, each death a reopening to the dark undifferentiated, the unfathomable, timeless, aspect of the unity of consciousness/the world, the ground unity from which all plurality arises, and into which it returns.
And consequently, no person is just an individual, but a centre of relations both backwards and outwards in relative time. Phenomenal change and unchanging reality are not two. It is one reality with different aspects.
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VISIONS
1; Time
A flash of lightning, and I see-
‘A pile of bones is hovering mid-air, some twenty feet over a strange waste-ground, all broken cement, charred by fire and long years. Brown and grey brambles in dirty orange bloom, flailing in the squall night-wind
But the bones move not. They hover there, still as in death’s sleep, unswayed by the furious gale’
Darkness again, then another flash, and I see-
‘The bones rewrapped in their old flesh, a bed beneath them, in the structure of an old house.
My house, my bed, my bones and old flesh.’
Seventy years hence, is now. The world itself knows no time, nor space, nor differentiation. The world knows them not, yet sees them, through our eyes. Our consciousness is the world in dream. Here is fuller reality; appearance, then change, then absence and return.
In the dream vision I see the world as it is, with time double-exposed. Past and future, not separate. What is now, was then, will be, and be again. For us, there is freedom and determinism. For the mind of reality, these dualities are not constraining.
It is the world’s mind and memory, the great and Real Consciousness. Not matter, not mind, yet also, not not-matter, not not-mind. Both , neither, all, and none.
This conscious self I appear as, is not mine- not mine alone, not mine at all. I am nothing, and yet spectator. I am nothing but a flicker in the world’s great dream.
No need for dread.
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2; Being
‘There are white footprints on the bridge. Still traces, though faded, of that morning’s ascent. Twenty-five years ago, my footprints. A morning after my eighteenth, I trailed through fresh paint and left my mark on the bridge.
If I were to meet him now as I climb, what would he, what would I see? Why ask- the seeing is now, and the seer is not separate. Separated, yet not separate. Distinct, but not two.
In ancient Egypt, a winged woman greets the dead- “behold! I am before thee, behind thee, I am thy mother, thy temple, forever, forever’. Seeing the filters is seeing past them. Change does not cease, but ceases to be change.
That morning, that man, that me are now, always will be, and still never were.
Countless worlds, just one thought.
Morning, and another change of light.’