NOEMAYA

How we perceive the world tells something about us and not the world.

World is essentially nothing other that the outward reflection of inward perception as I am myself nothing other than the inward reflection of outward perception.

To overcome the infinite regress implied by the apparent bipolarity of experience we can only posit a non-dual substratum. This substance as experience has two modes of Being: Immanence and Transcendence, Identity and Ecstasy, Inwardness and Outwardness.

Experience when objectifies itself into itself is the self, the empirical ego. Experience when objectifies itself out of itself is the world, the empirical reality. Thus, self and world are the two modes of Being, or excitation, of one and the same thing: I am the Yin and World is the Yang, or something like that.

The unity and identity of the two aspects of experience becomes obvious upon my reflection on experience: I see that I can never truly isolate myself from the world; I can’t put a well-defined boundary between myself and the world. The world that I perceive and know is the world that always already contains me in it. I also perceive myself as something already embedded in the world. World is always world as I see it. I am always what I am in the world, as something that is in the world. Thus if we resist the temptation to name names we can see that “I am nothing other than the world and the world is nothing other than me. It is always concepts that give us the illusion of distinction and separation. Pre-reflective experience is always a whole; it can’t be reduced to part and still be experience.

World is always my world; if I experience the world to be something shared with others it is still my world that is shared with others. When I am not neither is the world nor are the others.

This “I” however is not the personal “I.” “I” is essentially nothing; it has no character, no personality, no identity, no career and no resume, no income and no outcome; it is itself unemployed, yet without it no employment can ever be; it is itself nobody, yet without it no one can ever be.

This “I” is the not a thing but rather a verb: It is the experiencing. It is never anything that is experienced; it can’t be known since it is itself the very act of knowing. What is known is always other than the “I,” for the what is known is always something know by that which is other than itself. The “I” is only that for which world can be. Thus, there exists only one “I.” We are only different ways that this “I” pronounces itself. We are only utterances, existing briefly, some heard some not, but we are all the same in that we are all always on our way toward oblivion. Only the utterer is, indifferently staring into the withdrawal of the utterance into thin air.

Existence is just a misunderstanding.