NOEMAYA

What I saw frightened me, and I rushed to calm myself. I saw myself frightened. I could not have witnessed this unless I saw both myself and the fright together, as if hand in hand; so I sought to separate myself from the fright. I thought that I could remove myself from the locus of the fright, as if fright had its own place and I myself a place of my own, and the separation between them its own place too. And in establishing this arrangement, I saw myself, fright, and the separation between them under one and the same gaze. But then, I was speechless in wonder as to the place of this gaze itself. In seeing my fright, the fright pointed back at me as the seer of fright, for I could not have seen my fright if I wasn’t already distinct from it. Insofar as I see fright, fright has no business with me, and insofar as fright coincides with me, I wouldn’t be able to see it at all, and hence fright could not be what I take it to be. 

Anything that is, anything that is seen in the broadest sense of the word, cannot be here with me, least of all coincide with me; I must be distinct from it in order to see it. So too is the case with what I call my sadness, my anxiety, my pain: one cannot identify a thing that is identified with one. The seen and the seer cannot occupy the same place. Insofar as I see my pain it cannot be my pain in the sense of being in me or part of me. I can index it as “my pain” only in speech, but that which is indexed is there and not here with me; it must be there for me to be able to index it in the first place. 

The There, a purely phenomenological concept, is not the spatial quality of distance. It’s an a priori intuition emanating from the phenomenological dimension which provides the very condition for the possibility of spatial distinction. The phenomenological experience of expanse is that which bestows living meaning to spatial space, making it what it is. Far is infinitely near, and the near is infinitely far.   

The seen is a messenger; it is an index finger pointing to the seer. Whatever you see, you cannot be it. The most general idea you have of yourself, as a this or a that, with such and such pleasant or unpleasant qualities, a human-in-the-world, etc., is an idea you see yourself experiencing; you cannot be it if you are able to describe it. Whatever you think of yourself is something thought, and you are seeing yourself thinking being yourself. The seer must be apart from the seen, or else seeing would be impossible. Thus, anything you say of yourself and your states is not what you are. The seer cannot see itself. Have your eyes ever seen your eyes?

You cannot say you have a turbulent mind unless you are seeing that you have a turbulent mind; and if you see yourself having a turbulent mind, then you cannot be the turbulent mind! If you see yourself in confusion, you must have seen your confusion clearly, for how else could you clearly distinguish between confusion and clarity! If you were confused about confusion, you wouldn’t know you are looking at confusion; you wouldn’t be able to know if you’re confused at all. Thus, there is a fundamental detached clarity in all seeing, for seeing is always clear though it may be the seeing of the phenomenon of unclear. Only light can bring darkness into existence.  

And when you are happy, how do you know you are happy? Aren’t you seeing yourself being happy? Who is seeing you being happy? In whose seeing are you witnessing yourself happy? If being happy is something you see, then you are not it: you are beyond sad and happy, beyond hope and despair, beyond being touched by qualities. You are the seer of qualities and not in any way the bearer of them.  

They asked me, “how can I arrive at this state?” What can I say to that? To an empty question answering which would perpetuate the question itself! Arrival is a state of mind. If you cannot access it now, you will never access it, and you will always be in the rush to get somewhere else, to find something else, to do something else. 

We haste because we believe we have not arrived. We do because we believe things are undone. We move because we believe there is a there, like a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick tied to its back. Living in captivation, entrenched in our own games, we live with a fatal seriousness that only magnifies the borrowed meanings of our projections. 

Like a child that believes there is a depth and a whole world inside the TV screen, we too reach out to grab as if there’s something there, and we always return empty-handed. Reaching out to touch the world, or reaching in to touch ourselves! Like a hand coming out of a mirror, one sees it going in and another sees it going out. Which is the reflection and which is the real? Again, the wrong question. 

Humanness! What a stubborn mask! What a lucid reflection! What is behind the mask? The eternally anonymous onlooker who must live in concealment for the world to stay in appearance; that dark-skinned sun whose glimpse will make this world disappear in an instant as if it never even was and never will be. 

The world is naught but a reflection, a sheer emptiness. An image reflected on a mysterious flux. 

I was once home, my face and my beauty concealed to my self. In a moment of lapse, my glance accidentally fell upon the river of time, and I became entranced by my image and obsessed with the beauty I saw; I drowned from longing, forgetting that one cannot possess a reflection. This world is because I am drowned in it, drowned in the longing to possess a reflection! 

To pull oneself out from a beginningless enchantment that’s called the world! This enchantment is the humanness. To be human, to experience oneself as such, is to be entrenched in enchantment; it is God in trance! Distinction, separation, to have a place, to have time, the duality of the reflected and the reflection, all are dances of longing. There is no motion where there is no where to move. 

Don’t chase the things you see. The seen is meant to guide you find the seer. Find the seer while you can: the Seer, hidden in plain sight, has all your answers.

The face of Truth is concealed by a golden vessel.