NOEMAYA

One cannot become what one has not conceived. One cannot lead oneself into a new experience. Yet what if there is a new way of being waiting just beyond imagination? The completeness of Being entails the possibility of all modalities of existence within consciousness. There is no way of being that is not prefigured into the fabric of Being. We may speak of gradual progression and sudden transformation, the slow approach and the abrupt leap. It reminds me of how a droplet of water glides toward another, drawn by invisible tension, and then, all at once, merges into it. That is how the evolution of being unfolds: imperceptibly, then completely.

To clarify, I am not speaking of physical forms of existence such as different species, nor of typical or functional forms within the same species, such as individuals of different temperaments and talents and moral stance. The form of Being I have in mind is spiritual and deep, a form that is not an occurrence in the world but rather a form that contains and grounds the world of appearance and its meaning and significance. Not a way of being possessed or determined by the individual but rather a being of the spirit, of consciousness, that determines all the possible ways of being of the individual. All individual modalities of being are manifestations and shades of that deeper, collective way of being. It makes itself manifest in epochs and through many, though some may be more receptive to it than others. And it is the prerogative of the human race, for the animal world is completely shut off to that dimension: it springs from It, of course, but it can’t look back as the connection is a one-way stream.

These transitions in fundamental, world-shattering ways of Being is in constant ebb and flow. Often, it possesses the cores of men and women through epochs lasting thousands of years. The question is: Is there a new man waiting for us? A superman? And is that how It descends: first sensed in the souls of the sensitive, like Nietzsche’s, as something vast quietly approaching? Like a great ship in the sky, first announcing its presence through its shadow before its form is visible? The expiring, or rather the retiring current form of Being, or Being-epoch, flooded the preceding one around 400–600 BC, when the first tremors of wonder stirred in humanity.

My father once gave me a materialistic account of that turning point in history. He said that civilization had advanced just enough for man to find some peace from constant struggle, that he had shelter, stored food, and, for the first time, leisure. And in that leisure, certain men found space to withdraw from the hustle of life and begin to wonder about reality itself. It was from this leisure, he said, that philosophy was born. And that didn’t happen only in the ancient Greece but more or less across the globe.

It’s an elegant explanation, but incomplete. Our modern interpretations of history are bound by a deep bias: they refuse to acknowledge what cannot be measured. Science, by definition, will only recognize causes that fit its instruments. What cannot be detected cannot be admitted. Yet this is like trying to see a sound or hear a color. The world of hearing transcends the world of sight—not by hierarchy, but by inaccessibility. Likewise, there may be transcendental influences in history that science will forever miss, seeing only the faint shadows of what truly moves.

Still, let us assume my father’s story is true—that leisure gave rise to philosophy. Even so, why would man, an animal tuned for survival and pleasure, use his leisure not to indulge his instincts but to stare upward into transcendence? Why would this creature, born of cosmic dust and bound by time and finitude, begin to ask questions about eternity? The usual explanation is fear of death, but that is another shallow reduction. Fear of death presupposes an awareness of non-being, and that awareness is itself a transcendental act. No animal fears death. They only feel pain and are hard-wired to escape and avoid it by design and not by choice, for there cannot exist a conception death in a being that knows nothing but life. The concept of death requires a being who can think non-being, to contemplate what it means not to be, a quite questionable mental process and one which science can never ground in a materialistic framework.

And even granting that man could conceive such a thing, how do we explain those who not only thought of non-being but went beyond it and made it home, those who spoke of higher realities with joy and not out of fear, who described eternity not as escape but as presence? Figures like Plato or Plotinus and what came out of their mouths cannot be explained as mere byproducts of biology or accidental impulses in search of meaning for life. It wouldn’t make sense that all such pursuits of meaning should look into the same direction, what’s above, or rather what’s within! Their vision doesn’t fit the model of a nervous system reacting to stimuli. These were men who glimpsed a realm that wasn’t “after” life but within it—an eternal now encompassing all.

So why does man, some men and women, always look up? Why, whenever he has time to rest, does he not look sideways, but skyward? If an animal kept returning to the same hidden corner and barking at it, we’d assume something was there. Should we not assume the same of ourselves? This persistent orientation toward transcendence suggests not accident but attraction, a gravitational pull of the soul. When Newton saw that all objects fell toward the earth, he concluded not that they chose to move, but that something called them. And he didn’t discard his intuition when he saw things that didn’t fall like others; instead, he postulated that an obstacle must be in the way of their fall, a resistive or blocking influence. Perhaps, in the same way, the soul’s upward gaze reveals a telos, a call, a quiet gravity from above; and those souls who don’t seem to be looking in that direction, they in fact are; it’s only that their gaze seem to have stopped at the worldly appearances that block the light of the heavens.

The story short: Who, then, can we become? We cannot leap into the unimaginable through thought alone. We can only think our way to the edge of what is thinkable; and once we reach it, the leap happens on its own. So for now, strive toward the thinkable ideal. The unthinkable ideal—the superman—becomes accessible only from the vantage point of the realized one. The drop cannot merge with the ocean until it has come to the surface.

Perhaps that is the secret of our history. Not that man invented wonder, but that wonder is what calls him. Not that he created transcendence, but that transcendence has been whispering to him all along.