I alone am. And there is nothing besides me for me to like or dislike, to please or displease me. Like a child fearing what his own imagination has projected into the darkness, it seems as though there’s fear of my own self-disclosure, the endless possibilities of being. My own face is concealed and yet constantly presented to me as a hole through which a reality seems to show itself, a reality as if it were outside that hole and pouring in. And this reality shows itself precisely as though it were extended beyond that possessed halo we call the world, its periphery coinciding with the outline of the hole I deem to be my face. It is not that the world is outside of me but rather that the world manifests itself in the very mode outside-of-me. The peculiar sense of being that it has is the sense being-outside or being transcendent. This is the essential being-sense of all things worldly.
The I in the centrifugal essence of its manner of Being, discloses itself to itself as though it were apart from itself and as though it were the other. It indicates itself in the absolute otherness of the other, just as antithetic determinations where the opposites determine each other in their very opposition. The extended, durable, transcendent, and determinate other signals the dimensionless, timeless, immanent, and indeterminate center of all projections. And you tell me, is there any depth in the experience of depth? Is there any duration in the experience of time? Is the experience of space itself something situated in space? Is a wave anything but water? The I permeates all things, and all things are but the smearing of the I.
Remember when Being hadn’t yet slipped out from the sight of our gentle recognition, before it dawned into its apparent concealment so that the moon could brag of its existence for a minute! And now you see the slur and not the ink, beings and not the ground, and yet nothing has changed, for there never was anything to change into. Now you are disposed, and toward what? If you can’t break the shackles of this enchantment, it’s because there is nothing to break. One cannot escape an imagined reality except by returning to himself. And even that is misleading. Has one ever left himself in order to return to himself? That which shows itself hides in plain sight, and if it’s not seen it’s because it’s the only thing that is seen. Thinghood is beneath us, the playground of the mind, of discursive knowledge, sheer blindness.
I retreated to the center, and there I found myself welcoming myself with abundant warmth. The host and the guest I was, and upon my arrival I found that all things were done for me, even my very arrival. No work could penetrate where I was. And what is work but the movement of the will to close up the gap between the seed and the fruit? Work cannot enter where no separation is permitted.
And yet dwelling at the center, I saw my shadow dancing in the periphery. I had to become the other in relation to myself in order for the other, God, to become me. And when you become a stranger to yourself, when you know yourself not, when nothing familiar is familiar anymore, it’s only when your true nature, the absolute stranger, becomes familiar; it is recognized in a flash of spiritual intuition. When the world is seen through in its shadowness, the animator is found.
Why be bothered by yourself so much? Why so much seeking? Why are you hammering enlightenment in the ears of the deaf ego? What are you trying to escape? Why are you trying to awaken the dead? Can the shadow ever find its way back to its source? Don’t you see that a shadow a nothing? Don’t pick at this human appearance so much. There is nothing to fix and control; there is nothing but appearance. Behold the appearing itself, for when you do you are not bothered by anything, for thinghood is beneath you.
NOEMAYA 