EVERYTHING IS (IN) EVERY THING: the phenomenology of identity.

William Blake

“To See a World…”

(Fragments from “Auguries of Innocence”

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.

He who shall train the Horse to War
Shall never pass the Polar Bar.
The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.
The Gnat that sings his Summer song 
Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.
The poison of the Snake and Newt
Is the sweat of Envy’s Foot.

A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so;
Man was made for Joy and Woe;
And when this we rightly know
Thro’ the World we safely go.

Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are Born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight.
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night.  

To hold Infinity in the palm of my hand and Eternity within this hour.

This is the small gratuity I ask from this existence in part exchange for my having been thrown into this, my own bewilderment (like a dog without a bone).  Forced to navigate my senses, follow my faculties like distant stars, through the patterns they find in the cosmos,  along the paths of meaning thrown up by the backwash of sensations that bombard and ignite my senses.

I 'find' myself sitting, often.

I mean, that I find the awareness of my self as my Self,  generally  recurs to me when I’m sitting.

Occasionally standing, if overlooking a view or gazing at the horizon beyond the sea, past the mountains, towards the limits of my imaginings.

The visual persistence of the horizon, a clear razor edge slicing existence into the upper half and the lower half of my perception.  Between the two,within the cusp of duality emerges events, like ships rising from the edge of the world.

This curiosity has been my meditation since I was first aware of my own awareness.

My brain in the background, is a clockwork organic, a steam spunk mechanism that maintains my essential monotonies  unaffected by the passage of time.    Work-earn-pay-repeat.

And then I will die, like my father died 2 years ago; like my mother wll within these months.  Like my daughter died when she flew away to her other life without me.  Like my sister died; and David and Gamma and Meryl and everyone else I have known.  the price of awareness  is loss.  

We dream that we are immortal all the way up til the moment that we die.

I have paid all my bills this morning; my rent is up to date.  My credit rating is sound: I am a good citizen.

So I can afford this self-Indulgence, this amateur excavation of my  Self, my sense of this world in which I find my ‘Self’.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

These sense are my prison cell, the box of concrete and credit worthiness that boxes in my wild madness; my inner demonic desire to rape and kill and own; and then regret.    But in the pause comes recollection.  the resident of the box is real.  My restlessness will not abide illusion or the rhythm of mindless repetition.  

Reason is a motive.  

Understanding, an incentive.

The Red pill or the Blue?   And who exactly is the Pharmacutical in this particular reality shift?

What about the purple pill where I can dream the dream of others and still remain half awake?   If I can maintain my passive gaze through the coloured glass of this kaledocopic dilation of my perception.  If I can see the light through the glass aidst the colours that fragments this spectrum.  If I swim the sea of signifiers towards the other shore, the one I started swimming from; will I go mad?

Unlikely.  

The mad and magical largely travel unnoticed or intentionally ignored amongst us.

I will not go mad, instead I will try my utmost to drive you mad.

Walk this way with me …

Every belief, desire, etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted.  The expression “intentional inexistence” to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish mental phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.  In order to study the structure of consciousness, owe have to distinguish between the act of consciousness and the phenomena at which it is directed (the objects as intended).  The bridge, the door the passage betweent he apparently iner world and the apparent ‘outer’ world of physical reality is through our intentionality, that violition that derives from us and provokes our action-in-the-world.  Therefore the “world of objects” and ways in which we direct ourselves toward and perceive those objects is  conceived  in what we call the “natural standpoint”, which is characterized by a belief that objects exist distinct from the perceiving subject and exhibit properties that we see as emanating from them.   This is our default perception of our selves and the world we inhabit.  A turbulant sea of tense dualities; Good & Evil; Wrong & Right.  

The Mindful strive to calm the sea in order to see the currents better.

The phenomenological way of perceiving objects by examining how we, in our many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually “constitute” them; from the Phenomenological standpoint,  objects cease to be something simply “external” and cease to be seen as providing indicators about what it is, and  becomes instead, uncovered as merely a grouping of perceptions belonging to me, the subject. 

So we begin to understand out perceptions, our understnading of the reality we inhabit as a result of interactions between the objects that we recognize and our intent towards that which we recognize as us or ours or part of our world. If we recognize the perceptions as our own, then we begin to identify the components of who we are.  

These fragments, like Osiris’s dismembered body, when reassembled, resurrects the Self that has always stood behind the curtain, tweaking the shapes and lights of our illusions.

My claim is that these are also the fragments of a reality in which the cypher of our existence, the Who in Who We Are, can be found within every moment, every fragment of profound reflection.  Each acknowledgement of our irrevocable impact on our own world.   Perception is an act of assault by our senses.  

  The keyhole through to the world as it is, is available at every given moment of consciousness.  Each and every one of our perceptions holds the keys to who we really are.

Just take a look .  .  .  :~)