The No-Eye Eye
In this post, I've tried combining both of my usual types; creative writing and some philosophical musings.
Hope you enjoy (or at least don't get a headache!).
1-creative writing piece;
The Eye
“Verily, from out thine own eyes, I see. If thou couldst see through mine, haply would thou know of the Great Life- my perpetual breath, circling through the worlds. I am here, though thou hast forgotten me, and in the nature of mortal life it is so. Before ought congeals in form, before and after, all returns and turns, I am, and my eye sees. All the without, is all the within.
Witness how all the worlds rise from me, have me as their base, and know that into me, shall they all melt away- indeed! Thou know’est, thou perceive’th not the dynamics of thine own body, from out which thy vision opens. How much less dost thou see as the foundation, though in it is thy true self.
The mind pervades all things, is the consciousness which hears, sees, cognises through myriad forms,.
The world is as inseparable from the mind as is the heat from the fire. Seek thou to know the truth of both . Seek to realize the no- self self. I am Emptiness, all this, beyond being and non-being”
2; philosophical musings
The Problem with Objectification
Objectification, no less than reflection, is always the production of abstracts from concrete experience. This ‘experience’, or simply the activity of being, is impenetrable to discursive thinking, although continuously active at the base of discursive thinking. What is real is active and always present, while what is illusory is the static, and abstract. The products of discursive thinking begin and end with an original abstract, or fracture, namely the bifurcation into subject and object. From this original abstract /fracture come all subsequent dualities. Some purely functional (as the necessary attitude of an intelligent organism interacting with and subsisting off it’s environment) some further developed abstracts, or even purely speculative, and some a mixture of both. The latter of which is what common sense, or ordinary consciousness, might be regarded as.
The objectification of anything is it’s abstraction from concrete actuality, the latter being another way of saying experience. Even time, or absolute time, is such an objectification. We cannot help but think in ways which present time as a condition- but this is simply the characteristic of discursive thinking which is always concerned with relationships and understanding relationships. Relationships between what? Objectified and substantialised phenomena of perception, taken as if they were to some degree really static, discrete objects separable from their context and the causes and conditions of their appearance.
Touch is the sense-perception often regarded as presenting the most reliable perception of reality. However the material interpreted through the sense of touch is the same as that revealed through the other senses- light perception etc. If science can understand all physical phenomena in terms of energy, then we can’t assume that the picture of the world we get through touch, or what we commonly understand as the ‘material’ world, is really a penetrating grasp of the world.
We normally think of consciousness as something subjective. However consciousness is also a phenomenon of the ‘objective’ world, albeit only by inference (as in, consciousness cannot be an object for itself, nor can the plurality of consciousneses be apparent, though we can be certain that whatever consciousness is, it’s not limited to me or you). Consciousness is part of the same fabric of reality as the objective, empirical, or material universe.
Furthermore, what we call individual subjective consciousness has as it’s content objective phenomena, be they what we consider external or internal objects. In fact, we can differentiate something as ‘individual/subjective’ if we take the view from the standpoint of the objective world which contains individuals. But in in doing so, in taking on that standpoint of the objective world, we are in fact ‘subjectifying’ it, giving it a subjectivity. This latter is an acknowledgement of a certain subjective unity of the world/existence or at least, a unifying field for existence.
The status of these things coming from the basic abstract/fracture which we then overlay upon concrete, immediate experience and which colour our understanding of ourselves and the world – namely these positions, subject and object – are at most temporary configurations or designations arising from the dynamic activity of experience/consciousness. They are thoroughly dependent, conditionally arisen, and really empty of self and other.