The Picture

reflection on death

“the Will as thing-in-itself is one and harmonious. To it’s affirmation as world on the other hand self-conflict is essential, becoming visible in the plurality of it’s manifestations in time and space. Beyond the phenomenal world there is harmony, within it discord”¹

When someone is no longer ‘in the picture’, no longer the phenomenon of a living being in time and space, that which was their inner essence remains. It remains because only phenomena change. Phenomena, arranged from sense-data by the forms of our intellect, embodied as the brain, inherent in all perception. Arranged thus before any further reflection, a world seems already there and present just as it appears. A world of arising and passing away, of appearance, growth, joy, tragedy, death and decay. And yet, all this is mere surface shimmer.

Whether the dumb activity in a single atom in a galaxy furthest from our own, or the most familiar presence and pressing of a memory, or the intricacies of incessant scheming that seem obligatory today in these societies where ever more resources are clutched ever tighter by ever fewer, and everyone else is doomed to serve, grind, or fall and be despised- all are the clashing outer expressions of an inner harmony. That which is manifested as the world of phenomena dwells outside of the brain-wrought phenomenal forms. Unconditioned by these filters of time, of space, and that faculty which assigns casual relations between the multivariate outer forms manifested by the non-plural essence, the latter is in itself, truly free.

‘The picture’ is spread over a cave wall of time, space, and causality. Upon it dance the differentiated shadows of this fractured life; beautiful, painful, terrifying though they are. But what is real, both of the world and ourselves, has never appeared, never fractured, and is ever one and the same.

THE PICTURE

Poor fools we both, yes you and I,

Trusting scenes before curtain-fall;

Frightening earth under pitiless sky-

Firelight’s mirth on the old cave wall.

1. Paul Deussen, “The Elements of Metaphysics”, 1894