NOEMAYA

World, we think of it as a collection of objects; but there is a special angle, concealed to most, from which one sees that the world is really a face. In other words, when we see the world we are in fact not seeing. Human perception is a case of epidemic blindness when it comes to higher truths. But as a blind person can feel the world that he cannot see, we too feel that face; we know it as music, as art, as mathematics, and as the sense of the sacred, as that which uplifts us from our immanence in the world in moments of ecstasy and transcendence.

To see the world is to not see the Face.

But this Face is peculiar. It is a face that removes all fears and doubts, though it shoots in our hearts a fear of a new kind, a fear of an infinite totality in the face of whom we lose our tongues. How can one even begin to express this face when all expression is nothing but the expressions of the face itself!

Deluded by our commonsense and shallow convictions we have come to accept without a doubt that world is an expanse, that it has depths and dimensions, befores and afters. But world is really like a flat sheet of paper; it is expansive if we look at in its flatness; but rotate it and you see that it is nothing but the thinnest of all expanses. The Face too is right in our face; we can’t see it because we are facing its edge, and hence we think we see the world. But find that sacred angle: The world disappears and the Face appears. Then you will know that it is all the Face and nothing else. Thus, one who sees the Face must die.