NOEMAYA

One must look upon manifestation, or phenomenon, as the visible tip of an iceberg. Visible phenomena are rooted in the invisible, yet intelligible, abyss. Veiling and unveiling always occur simultaneously. A visible cup would not be visible if it didn’t have missing sides, sides facing away from the viewer. When one moves around a tree to view different perspectives of it one does so at the cost of letting go of the currently available perspectives. Phenomena always appear in perspective, and to have a perspective is to miss the totality. These instances from the space of vision also hold for all cognitive acts: Phenomena are but the end products of cognitive acts. What appears always appears to the eyes, ears, memory and imagination, reason and intellect, spiritual synthesis or scientific analysis faculties, etc.

The phenomenal world is what it is in virtue of its partial view, its halfhearted givenness to consciousness, which makes for the experiences of time and space. We always experience ourselves as located somewhere in the world, both spatially and temporally, i.e. historically, while the rest of the world, which is most of it, is inaccessible to us at that moment. To make more of the world accessible to us we must leave our location, and hence let oblivion replace the manifestations where we formerly stood.

This universal structure of manifestation also holds for human existence: We are that which is only given to us instantaneously while most of our being is submerged in memories and available only through often subconscious anticipations. Man is essentially located in the abyss; it is his consciousness that holds together the idea of a human person with a well-defined identity. The moment we come to face ourselves we are already snatched by the veiling current of time which at once unveils newer sides of our being from the inaccessible storage unconscious, the unmanifest. In other words, we never truly see ourselves but rather always think ourselves. Or, what we know of ourselves is only the small tip of an iceberg submerged and floating in the ocean of the invisible: From the abyss we rose and to the abyss we shall return is a somewhat misguided interpretation: Let it suffice to know that we never really left the abyss; we are the abyss.