NOEMAYA

Human experience: Experience in which the subject is the spirit and the object is nature.

Spiritual experience: Experience in which the subject and the object are both the Spirit.

Nature is manifest Spirit. Spirit is unmanifest nature.

Therefore, human experience is by nature a spiritual experience; it is the Spirit looking at its own image in the mirror of nature.

And herein lies the mystery of the doctrine of creation by reflection: “Man is created in the image of God.”

From an esoteric perspective, God looking into the mirror of nature sees its own image in an outwardly limited form, an image which is the human person. God does not create man as something other than itself, for the infinity of God precludes any conception of the other; the human being is personified divinity sunk into the forgetfulness of its own true nature.

The Fall was not the fall of man but the fall of God, the fall of god into man, a fall into apparent finitude and temporality, that is the fall of consciousness into the multitude of inferior and fragmented states.

From a deeper and more esoteric perspective, the human person is the emanating ray of the self-contemplation of the One. Human is to God as a light ray is to the sun.

In all of this, God is not a being or a possible object of consciousness. God is the homogeneous state of consciousness, and not a state of human consciousness. Quite the opposite: it is the human experience that is a state of god-consciousness.

In other words, god-consciousness in its fallen and inhomogeneous form is what we know as this human experience or samsara, and when this human state makes a transition to its homogeneous, supra-human state we know it as Nirvana.

And at the end of the day, the sage knows that Samsara is Nirvana; I am Brahman; An Al-Haq (I am the Truth.)