First approach to the topic

There is ultimately only one subject, which is the Spirit, and a single object, which is the world. Nature is a system of objects, but there is no principle of division absolutely valid, it can be treated as one entity objectal divisible by endless path. These routes meet the configurations determined subjects and train with them nexus variables, such as the world of children is significantly different from that of adults. Subjects and objects are in a unique and vital process, a continuous epigenesis is the very movement of nature, without being able to detect any explicit teleology. However, the idea of purpose emerges spontaneously from the surprising adaptation of organisms to their environment. Surprising in terms of the understanding, which considers separately the concepts of living and nature of reality itself and is embarrasé both falling by their congruence. But for a deeper vision, which is also aware of the origins and nature of this understanding, all the paradoxes raised by the consideration of the existence of topics to be within a goal is not a real contradiction Nor even a problem. Because it is not a fact but an interpretation, which admittedly is imperative first to reason that attempts to develop in a cultural context which has a content universally socio-pragmatic and not alethic. The size and practices referred to the human community are a form of truth, and even a prominent Wirklichkeit. As nature is the truth that lies in itself, while animated by a negative movement, which manifests itself in a cyclical, and deterministic chaos, humanity, as far as can speak as of a real entity (and we are well aware of talk here in terms of metaphors Hegelian), which is itself perceives as the progress report (history), freedom and order (family, the State , Customs, religion). It is as if the conscience sought to push the poles of human nature, as if the intensity of its sense of proportion was this tension, and could quote the profound theories of Baudelaire. Almost all cultural practices and beliefs expressed such a trend, the prohibition of incest to technology, scarification of the myths that give human origin and supernatural value. We can discuss the limits of such a hypothesis. But the crux of anthropology is in any case the conviction of being an individual, ie a real entity, both collective and personal. The group makes me exist in its physical structure, its language and its system of values, but the first of these is to be inserted me into a system similar to me, because it contains all bases and other . The laws, codes and pipes only make sense for the ego and taken intersubjective in a network. Doubt the validity of the ego is to put distance of all the superstructures and all beliefs. However, if that doubt leads to a clear understanding of ontogenesis who is behind this "fact" it is likely that the conscience and free of illusions anthropological does not change the course of society than nature, as precisely this distinction has faded.

This text is like any other work of consciousness through a body, including all déterminités leads in each moment the content, depending on the particular historical unity where psycho-physical sediment some experience world. In this sense, I am not free to respect the thoughts that "I" that noise from the street. The distinction is only a cerebral process, and a exosomatique, not of kind. What happens in my brain does not differ essentially from what is going on in that of any other man, and what happens in the world is also uniform. "The surprise is often assumed that several miracles where there is only one, of what we imagine in nature as many acts that many phenomena, while has perhaps never produced a single act "Diderot, Thoughts on the interpretation of nature, § 11.

Sex and death are commonplace versions of the ultimate. But the ultimate is no less present in the daily neutrality in the moments of intensity. Because the goal is to be. We will say that sees more clearly, more directly in certain situations preferred. And this is especially true in the case of mystical experience. But a deeper, we can appoint philosophical, we would do better not to appoint, recognizes the unwavering unity of this being which is nothing other than fate, and is also a void in the meaning of the term. None because not something which is not likely to be shortened to one definition or description, because we have no way of knowing what the objective being, a being in grasp itself. The substrate may also be designated by the word God, and it is legitimate to see in any investigation philosophical or scientific non-religious theology, because all the companies seek a determination thought to be. But they are almost always superficial in that they neglect the first issue of the topic, the nature of consciousness and the impossibility of separating all aspects of its content in its own essence. The sad and recurring error of their theology is subservient to tradition, dogma, which usually defuses the possibility of genuine discoveries, a recognition of his pure purpose, which is none other than the subject. The term high of a mystical or theological question is indeed formula as well: nothing but God does not exist, I am God. Conclusion strictly parallel, provided they understand the words in their true to the idea that all existence is natural, and that I exist. That is why the most fruitful of philosophy is simply Deus sive Natura. But it should add sive ego, where ego has the meaning we give to conscience, not of course, the empirical ego. Yet it is not outside of nature, or else it, but it is one being in the same way that any animal, whose unity is the index of the unit itself nature in its mental and expanded. Each collection proves that the conceptual division of the visible and the invisible is a simple perspective effect, a bias induced by the use of coarse concepts of human culture, as long as I déprenne, I can not find solution of continuity between the distant star that I look and no aspect of my inner life, his memory, words can describe, star, or estrella stella, etc.., the Greek myth associated with its constellation, the emotion that aesthetic resulting astrophysical concepts that I make on its nature, metaphysical speculations that may arise, and so on. That is as wide variety of these donations, they are all aware of the contents of ephemeral, produced by the chaotic determinism to be concrete, I am tempted to call my own habit. Certainly, I can say that this body is mine, that this soul is mine, as I say that this dog, this book or this house are my property, although they could belong to others in the past And so in the future. It is clear that ownership is a concept whose value is practical and legitimacy relative. From a theoretical point of view, claim that the body belongs to me that I see is an absurdity. But tell you is that we perceive it permanently, and thus alone. Well, the universe too, although I change, I see the permanently-do I say that it is mine or me? But I feel my body inside! -Does this mean that you perceive the world since its outside? Are we not permanently within this universe, the body was perceived as the most consistent and most immediate? Such a dialogue can not take away from the fallacy because its terms and subject are free clarity. It seems that the concept of property has an origin and meaning much socio-legal, and not metaphysical.

Certainly, we followed the analysis of Merleau-Ponty, and we n'impliquons not own that the body should be closed on the body Cartesian, we recognize the specificity of the flesh. But precisely for that, because it is the "mid trainer of the subject and object, we believe it is wrong to appoint me or mine, at least the enigma that is pushed further and that we must re-examine its terms. If I am the chair, then I'm the middle pre-pre-objective and subjective. That we give, and that is what we call consciousness. As Merleau-Ponty establishes the presence and pervasiveness of service in the heart of corporeality, we want to include the whole of nature in the concept of consciousness through the nexus of the living flesh, for this chair as I say my n ' is not separated from his universe, and either I extend to infinity my property either I punctum until the tightening of the transcendental ego. But in both cases it loses all meaning. And if it folds on a cutting interim, we ask our limits Socratic question: if you are your body because you feel his affections (and not those affecting another body), are you also your nails and your hair, which can be cut without arousing your soul in pain, or even attention? And when part or all of this body is numb or anaesthetized, and we withdraw any member or organ, t'at be diminished you? And if you're your body, do you think, because you can move your way, are you just his muscles, nerves and tendons, since the bones, innards and even its main body, the heart, not to mention the most fickle, spoken nicely Montaigne, your will has no prize? And it is neither sensation nor of the action, in what capacity you claim this animal? And we could consider many other aporias, such as to the scale of such an identity or ownership: Does the overall macroscopic form of the body, in living cells and even molecules (as we now know the role they play in the organic) or that of any of their many layers of arrangement? While these questions are not without naivety, but we seem to uncover another naivety more detrimental to the philosophical clarity.
Our assertion of the primacy of conscience is upside down in recognition of the functioning of the materialistic soul, which is a radical critique of anthropomorphism. The human conscience is not. She has no control over its representations, which are purely corollaries or epiphenomena of brain function, and as such, I have no control over the entire phenomenal physical and mental. I do not command or does no more thoughts and emotions available to me that those in the soul of another man. Less than return to some form of belief in the privileged status of the pineal gland, the "mine", we must agree that the interaction of physical structures and performances remains unintelligible. Certainly, we seem to us to contradict in several places, because sometimes we talk in terms of causality, whereas a state of the brain and nature as "cause" content aware, and sometimes we deny any possibility of relations between these different realities. But is that the views which we are trying to locate is beyond this alternative, two branches have a fertility own, and that we must embrace lucidity, taking into account the unilateral aspect of the concepts that we have. "It is also true to say that the subject knowledge is a product of matter to say that this is a simple representation of subject knowledge, only these are two views also close because materialism is the philosophy of the subject forgotten in its calculations. " M.V.R. P.682 What we need to add to remove this apparent contradiction is that, cerebral or psychological phenomena involved in the same indivisible phénoménalité, which is a representation of the rest abstract. What about the "same things" that we want back, where can we locate them? When we see our scientific knowledge may seem surprising that we do not perceive mozaïque influx of power, some linked to colors, the movements or other forms, according to horizontal and vertical stripes, no, we see a tree, a face, relieved of all neuro-perceptual mechanisms that were used in their preparation. When we hear our scientific knowledge may seem surprising that we do not see the friction of hair cells, the vibration of the eardrum, the shock of the hammer on the anvil, nor périlymphe of unrest in the inner ear , ETC. not, we hear a voice, engine, a bird, without any of their translation ELECTROCHEMICAL is aware. It may still be surprised by the complexity of these operations and the number of intermediaries, interphases, if only mechanical (vibration air, then solid and liquid, solid and again, what we call mécanotransduction ), And nerve beside the conscious of its simplicity, not to mention the brain processes data processing. Bergson explored this tension in the passage of Matter and memory devoted to the vibration of light. We can still decline our astonishment on the complexity of other organs of sense, since neither smell nor taste, touch or are left behind. But statuons that this extraordinary dichotomy between itself and the immediate sensation of the evidence as to the conscience must have a significant ontological significance. It appears that selects and feel simplifies, and the practical function of the body must have, as Bergson has successfully demonstrated a major role in its formation and its nature. But this simply means that our being psycho-physical form one indissoluble, and if perception and action are closely correllées, this is in line with our thesis that nature is a whole whose conscience is a witness in a manner determined And that nowhere in this process the ego has real function: our freedom is neither more nor less in the alleged action of that body's sensations. But rather that the natural movements of the body that appoints actions or perceptions as bodies set Thursday obey the same laws and are the moments one simultaneous process. Indeed, what we call our actions or the tactile sensation of muscle contractions some details? And what is a behavior if not a complex layout and invested meaning of such movements? If j'éternue, if I breathe, if my heart beats, if I lift the arms to protect myself from a projectile, which will say that I do an action? But if I speak, if I sigh "deliberately" to mark my boredom, if I feel certain emotions that accelerate my heart rate or if I raise a fist to strike an enemy, we agree that I share responsibility, authority on these phenomena, we speak of acts. It creates a category that is a monster ontological. And it relies on the fact that these body movements are preceded or accompanied by certain representations, volition or intentions, and they fall into identifiable cultural patterns and stereotyped. The excesses of this type of award us smile, and the medieval trial brought to animals to be convinced of the demon possessed, which Xerxes whipping the Hellespont for having thwarted his expedition, the characters of tragedy who accuse gods inspire their evil passions. But our penal institutions and our secular morality are based on similar idiosyncrasies whose presuppositions are also intangibles that the dogmas of a dominant religion. If such an understanding involves emptying the prisons and stop punishing criminals, we can not say because we reject the validity of any real form of duty-being. A human community enlivened by a recognition of the innocence of the future is conceivable, although highly unrealistic, but in our view a question of private philosophical type on this matter is all that is in our power ". The current operation of companies responding to a deterministic chaos just as efficient as the evolution of biological species finding does not correlate to discourage a revolutionary, for example, or social reform, on the contrary: in front of imperfection flagrant of all political systems, innovative energy is inevitable, even if no real improvement in the human condition is possible, superficial adjustments are still ongoing. In short, this vision of man and his socio-historical appears towards a abdéritisme, which makes us close to apolitical thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Pessoa.
But back to the question of perception. We say: I do not see my retina, but colors, objects, not the cochlea, but sounds, music. And what about the brain? I do not see synaptic transmission, but thoughts. And since the brain structure, it is clear that the five types of perceptions, memories and concepts are closely linked by the network of my past experience. Thought is only a certain kind of perception, according to a determination as strict as for the others, though veiled by its complexity and, again, transparency. Note that we do not have direct perception of the brain as such (except in the case of migraines, but which seem due to malfunctions in the bloodstream), as the ear is missing from his -- it is actually the sound that is our perception of the ear and brain processing zones hearing and vibrations surrounding air. Similarly, some of the cortex activity is directly collected in the form of performances, and this activity can be described as a chaotic redistribution of memories in accordance with certain laws drives association, fun, habit, etc.. However, the brain can not be considered as the subject of consciousness, it is only part of a body, without the slightest independence, devoid of real entity status and is simply nexus essential to the formation of representations of all known species. In fact, we can not appoint or thing or concept, as the subject, and that is why it seems therefore to treat none. But this term does not refer to a simple négatité abstract, since it encompasses all the richness of its possible targeted content, and therefore it means rather an absolute plasticity, the very soul of Aristotle, who "is in somehow all things "am Yuch PWJ panta estimates because it is nothing special. This soul is it that we want to name the conscience? Can we draw a line converge to join her and genuinely Yuch, anima cogito, xin, Chittam, mind, and all the major names of the mind? On behalf of the philosophical depth you need to sacrifice the language Acrib a moment, considering that all languages are hard to name it that thinks and perceives, and that what matters is not the name, but " thing. " Of course, compare the words, languages and cultures is highly interesting, such as different Chinese characters which mean being and spirit, and this is a whole unsuspected of human experience can reveal.

If we want to determine what is the topic of thought, we fall on either a contradiction or a tautology. In one case, we try to understand how the body, and thus the matter may think, in all, we are content with affirming the obvious void that thought thinks. And outside of this alternative, what could there be?
The essential virtue of a description of mental functioning is the distance against him. The same goes for many types psychic along the history of philosophy, and those of the Passions of the Soul and Ethics, which have less intrinsic value than negative, namely to make these mechanisms flat who play us and that we tend to identify. In examining the causes and classifications of an affect, we hold of its grip a part of our attention. But it eludes the efforts of categorization, and perhaps causality that we detect in the rest of the psychic: although it speaks of "power of attention, it seems hard to accept to see it as an option others, memory, imagination and thought. It might instead consider it as a bridge between the conscious and punctum our extensive psychological, unless it is the very conscience, when in action. So concludes the discovery of the structure of intentional consciousness. But not to return here in a debate too technical, let the concept of attention in its most common sense, the most immediate: we are more or less attentive to a conversation, a person, object, in a range of variance which is total distraction to the extreme concentration. Can we, should we make a real difference between our conscience and moving this attention? It seems volatile, even capricious; able to obey my will, but also to remain reluctant, for example as a result of fatigue. It can also refuse to settle on an object, work or reading, which refuse to abandon one painful memory, thought wrong. In his Anthropology, Kant spoke of the importance of the immense power of abstraction, which is the use of negative attention. An Indian proverb refers to the difficulty of monitoring as a precept: "Do not think especially an elephant!" which is a real twister to mind when thinking of not-A, A and he thinks its formal denial, but everything else is not thinking A. A stoic modern thought could amend 139 of Pascal stating that any misfortune of men just one thing, which is to know not remain at rest, in the metaphoric room of their soul, and that their attention ahead of their body, is struggling in the exteriority of space and time, often at his own expense. If the body when it leaves a perpetual unrest, be sure that the soul takes over, and most beautiful: yesterday, tomorrow, do this and that, always feared and provide hope, regret. Our physical body is lined with numerous imaginary extensions of the first drives, as all the modalities of the imagination: denial (asomatognosie) increase, substitution, distortion, etc.. Thus the soul is like an anamorphic moving body, projected in the dimension of meaning.
There is implicit we know that we are not something describable. The polysemy and misleading notions of soul or spirit confusedly reflect this knowledge, and betray the same time, because we are indeed a science, empirical or reflective, methodical or spontaneous, that entity. On the one hand, embodied the soul is a bastard, on the other, pure mind is an abstract concept. Both are inadequate perspectives on ourselves. But how would there be a clear vision of the home even prospects? In dissecting a retina, we see the arrival of the optic nerve and the absence of sensitive cells in this place, and the experience of Mariotte (1668), we easily see the presence and extent of the optical gap. But can we dissect the mind? No, this is still a vivisection of a autoscopie, and there was no psychic anatomy, but at most a physiology. Because the soul has no organs or tissues. He is credited faculties, and therefore the temptation is to substantiver, but they are only constants, avenues of its overall functioning, that thinking can separate, but discovers that the experience always in a dynamic unity. So I can say many things about myself, but where is this? In the soul, certainly, if that is its dialogue with itself. Socrates himself, who is reported to easily know thyself in a paternity approximate showed the aporias of such knowledge, and it typically reflects this by dividing the connoisseur and known. But, as Schopenhauer said, these categories that apply to the entire sphere of knowledge here lose their relevance: "The issue itself does not fall under these conditions [of thought, time and space], because it is always implicitly assumed by them. We can not use or plurality, or the category opposite unity. We will never know the subject, he knows, wherever there is knowledge. " (MVR § 2 p. 28-29) Our research has abolished it? Can we not identify the kernel of knowledge by following his target back stubbornly intent during which originates, which in a sense is itself? In consideration of the world as original amalgam of subjectivity, in examining the thought process that is as detached from the support be taking him in the effort to understand the perception as pure gift, we must gather clues to their common denominator.

The problem of meaning

Much of human activity can be described as an unconscious search for meaning, a determination uncertain within the sphere of meaning. But our existence precedes changes in meaning. We do not need a way to be. We are witnessing the emergence of things and the sense that we attach to their relations. We exist depending on how full passivity in the content of the mind and body movement. When certain types of correlations occur between representations and actions, we are accustomed to them as volition, we allocate a portion of the spontaneity that we observe, but neutral examination reveals that spontaneity can be something personal property. If thirst or hunger arises, we will provide food and drinks, eat, digérons, etc.. at any time it does something other than the operation of universal nature.
Even if there is something that we can appoint our 'will', we will suffer like any other donation phenomenal, I place a free source of any representation, it is an unfounded interpretation, perhaps just a fantasy Power, a hint of personal existence which ferments in the consciousness as a chronic fever. If there is even discussion about a choice, n'assistons us not to conflict of opinions and desires engaged in our psyche? The fact that we sometimes seemed to act "against reason", sometimes ignoring our inclinations, sometimes still in a confusion about our motives "real" shows that we are neither a party nor a judge in these internal struggles. If I transcendental exists, we do not see how practical it would participate in any discussion or any decision, implementation of the slightest gesture, and what is the empirical ego, it is a permanent concretion such sequences of experience, in aggregate become experiences without substantial unity. "There is no final causes or efficient causes; in both cases we draw a false observation ourselves false conclusions: 1) We believe voluntary action; 2) we believe at least act. Without doubt, without this belief, there would be no living beings, but is this a reason for it to be true? " (VP IV § 638) All we can honestly observed, they are concurrent, although it must take note of the case, perhaps as many lag, inconsistency or conflict, as when we want to eat or work, and do point to suppress offensive speech, and the vote, avoiding a scary thought, and never can. Because the forces and trends which we are certainly aware the tip of the iceberg psyche, so to speak. There is also a strong impulse easily unconscious or préconsciente usually implies a conscious explicitly, as in statements whose strength even arouses suspicion: "That is the kind of man I ever do fall love! " Perhaps that initial predictions of myth Oedipus (and many others) in such a substantive sense: while conscious thought declined to dread the mere idea of performing the most condemnable , And takes all measures to avoid (giving up the child, exile, etc.). The content of destiny, ie the impulse, always prevails over the surface of shenanigans 'intellect, and any woman with the man commits incest somewhere in any aggression there maiming a symbol father. But if it succumbs to some point temptation, as they say, are there if victory and freedom? Is it not rather the weakness of his instincts, or the preponderance of education or training? In the moral conflicts themselves, we can say that much of psychic energy is wasted. Certainly, this is also another point of view, formative stages of personality, but this is the entrenchment of a mistake. Which produces the impression of individual reality, it is the resistance, contrast, the apparent complexity of the legal divisions: the burning of fire and irresistibly tacitly convinces the child from the reality, mental suffering leads us to consider our interiority as an efficient and substance describable as a "I suffer" and, more generally, this process takes place during any type of experience. The constitution of the Umwelt is inseparable from the establishment of an inhabitant of this world, and look what is the first term does probably not a definite and unequivocal conclusion.

"The presence should be thinking beyond the simultaneous and successive. There is no real simultaneous because there is nothing how it could happen, not nature in itself be made of my flesh "(From being of the phenomenon, p. 261)

"In fact it is to grasp the nexus or 'historical' or 'geographical', history and geology transcendental, that time is space, that space is time, I have found by my analysis of visible and the flesh, the Urstiftung simultaneous time and space that is a historic landscape and an inscription near the geographic history. "V.I. p. 312?

My self I then perused, and limb by limb
Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran
With supple joints, and lively vigour led:
But who I was, or where, or from what cause,
Knew not; to speak I tried, and forthwith spake,
My tongue obeyed and readily could name
What e'er I saw.
- Milton, Paradise Lost, VIII, 253-73

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. .....

On the uselessness of art in relation to the structure of consciousness

we know the word's most famous Lessing, from the Rejoinder (1778): "If God wanted enclosed in his right hand truth, and in his left hand the unique and continuing momentum towards the truth, even with this condition additional deceive me always and forever, and if I said Choose! I jetterai with humility on his left hand and say: - Father, give! The gospel truth is that for you alone. " The search for truth is as fundamentally attitude towards truth lessigienne ever, always desired. This desire for truth is then correlate circulation in the manifest wisdom, commitment of theoretical knowledge it is also inseparable. We will lead to a harmonious vision of the thought of Lessing under the dual banner of truth and philosophical.

Huxley

The age-old debate between the actives and the contemplatives was being renewed - renewed, so far as I was concerned, with an unprecedented poignancy. For until this morning I had known contemplation only in its humbler, its more ordinary forms - as discursive thinking; as a rapt absorption in poetry or painting or music; as a patient waiting upon those inspirations, without which even the prosiest writer cannot hope to accomplish anything; as occasional glimpses, in Nature, of Wordsworth's "something far more deeply interfused"; as systematic silence leading, sometimes, to hints of an "obscure knowledge." But now I knew contemplation at its height. At its height, but not yet in its fullness. For in its fullness the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak, to its own higher power. Mescalin opens up the way of Mary, but shuts the door on that of Martha. It gives access to contemplation - but to a contemplation that is incompatible with action and even with the will to action, the very thought of action. In the intervals between his revelations the mescalin taker is apt to feel that, though in one way everything is supremely as it should be, in another there is something wrong. His problem is essentially the same as that which confronts the quietist, the arhat and, on another level, the landscape painter and the painter of human still lives. Mescalin can never solve that problem; it can only pose it, apocalyptically, for those to whom it had never before presented itself. The full and final solution can be found only by those who are prepared to implement the right kind of Weltanschauung by means of the right kind of behavior and the right kind of constant and unstrained alertness. Over against the quietist stands the active-contemplative, the saint, the man who, in Eckhart's phrase, is ready to come down from the seventh heaven in order to bring a cup of water to his sick brother. Over against the arhat, retreating from appearances into an entirely transcendental Nirvana, stands the Bodhisattva, for whom Suchness and the world of contingencies are one, and for whose boundless compassion every one of those contingencies is an occasion not only for transfiguring insight, but also for the most practical charity. And in the universe of art, over against Vermeer and the other Painters of human still lives, over against the masters of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, over against Constable and Turner, against Sisley and Seurat and Cezanne, stands the all-inclusive art of Rembrandt. These are enormous names, inaccessible eminences. For myself, on this memorable May morning, I could only be grateful for an experience which had shown me, more clearly than I had ever seen it before, the true nature of the challenge and the completely liberating response.
...
From this long but indispensable excursion into the realm of theory, we may now return to the miraculous facts - four bamboo chair legs in the middle of a room. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, they brought all manner of wealth - the gift, beyond price, of a new direct insight into the very Nature of Things, together with a more modest treasure of understanding in the field, especially, of the arts. A rose is a rose is a rose. But these chair legs were chair legs were St. Michael and all angels. Four or five hours after the event, when the effects of a cerebral sugar shortage were wearing off, I was taken for a little tour of the city, which included a visit, towards sundown, to what is modestly claimed to be the World's Biggest Drug Store. At the back of the W.B.D.S., among the toys, the greeting cards and the comics, stood a row, surprisingly enough, of art books. I picked up the first volume that came to hand. It was on Van Gogh, and the picture at which the book opened was "The Chair" - that astounding portrait of a Ding an Sich, which the mad painter saw, with a kind of adoring terror, and tried to render on his canvas. But it was a task to which the power even of genius proved wholly inadequate. The chair Van Gogh had seen was obviously the same in essence as the chair I had seen. But, though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact. The fact had been manifested Suchness; this was only an emblem. Such emblems are sources of true knowledge about the Nature of Things, and this true knowledge may serve to prepare the mind which accepts it for immediate insights on its own account. But that is all. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
It would be interesting, in this context, to make a study of the works of art available to the great knowers of Suchness. What sort of pictures did Eckhart look at? What sculptures and paintings played a part in the religious experience of St. John of the Cross, of Hakuin, of Hui-neng, of William Law? The questions are beyond my power to answer; but I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art - some refusing to have anything to do with it at all, others being content with what a critical eye would regard as second-rate, or even, tenth-rate, works. (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner. I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.
This was something I had seen before-seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers - what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel - how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli's picture.
Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake - or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many colored variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist. Stoical serenity reveals itself in the smooth surfaces, the broad untortured folds of Piero's draperies. Torn between fact and wish, between cynicism and idealism, Bernini tempers the all but caricatural verisimilitude of his faces with enormous sartorial abstractions, which are the embodiment, in stone or bronze, of the everlasting commonplaces of rhetoric - the heroism, the holiness, the sublimity to which mankind perpetually aspires, for the most part in vain. And here are El Greco's disquietingly visceral skirts and mantles; here are the sharp, twisting, flame-like folds in which Cosimo Tura clothes his figures: in the first, traditional spirituality breaks down into a nameless physiological yearning; in the second, there writhes an agonized sense of the world's essential strangeness and hostility. Or consider Watteau; his men and women play lutes, get ready for balls and harlequinades, embark, on velvet lawns and under noble trees, for the Cythera of every lover's dream; their enormous melancholy and the flayed, excruciating sensibility of their creator find expression, not in the actions recorded, not in the gestures and the faces portrayed, but in the relief and texture of their taffeta skirts, their satin capes and doublets. Not an inch of smooth surface here, not a moment of peace or confidence, only a silken wilderness of countless tiny pleats and wrinkles, with an incessant modulation - inner uncertainty rendered with the perfect assurance of a master hand - of tone into tone, of one indeterminate color into another. In life, man proposes, God disposes. In the plastic arts the proposing is done by the subject matter; that which disposes is ultimately the artist's temperament, proximately (at least in portraiture, history and genre) the carved or painted drapery. Between them, these two may decree that a fete galante shall move to tears, that a crucifixion shall be serene to the point of cheerfulness, that a stigmatization shall be almost intolerably sexy, that the likeness of a prodigy of female brainlessness (I am thinking now of Ingres' incomparable Mme. Moitessier) shall express the austerest, the most uncompromising intellectuality.
But this is not the whole story. Draperies, as I had now discovered, are much more than devices for the introduction of non-representational forms into naturalistic paintings and sculptures. What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being. More even than the chair, though less perhaps than those wholly supernatural flowers, the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with "is-ness." To what they owed this privileged status, I cannot say. Is it, perhaps, because the forms of folded drapery are so strange and dramatic that they catch the eye and in this way force the miraculous fact of sheer existence upon the attention? Who knows? What is important is less the reason for the experience than the experience itself. Poring over Judith's skirts, there in the World's Biggest Drug Store, I knew that Botticelli - and not Botticelli alone, but many others too-had looked at draperies with the same transfigured and transfiguring eyes as had been mine that morning. They had seen the Istigkeit, the Allness and Infinity of folded cloth and had done their best to render it in paint or stone. Necessarily, of course, without success. For the glory and the wonder of pure existence belong to another order, beyond the Power of even the highest art to express. But in Judith's skirt I could clearly see what, if I had been a painter of genius, I might have made of my old gray flannels. Not much, heaven knows, in comparison with the reality, but enough to delight generation after generation of beholders, enough to make them understand at least a little of the true significance of what, in our pathetic imbecility, we call "mere things" and disregard in favor of television.
"This is how one ought to see," I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers, or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. "This is how one ought to see, how things really are." And yet there were reservations. For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel. That would be enough. But in that case what about other people? What about human relations? In the recording of that morning's conversations I find the question constantly repeated, "What about human relations?" How could one reconcile this timeless bliss of seeing as one ought to see with the temporal duties of doing what one ought to do and feeling as one ought to feel? "One ought to be able," I said, "to see these trousers as infinitely important and human beings as still more infinitely important." One ought-but in practice it seemed to be impossible. This participation in the manifest glory of things left no room, so to speak, for the ordinary, the necessary concerns of human existence, above all for concerns involving persons. For Persons are selves and, in one respect at least, I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me. To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, its one-time fellows, seemed not indeed distasteful (for distastefulness was not one of the categories in terms of which I was thinking), but enormously irrelevant. Compelled by the investigator to analyze and report on what I was doing (and how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four chair legs and the Absolute in the folds of a pair of flannel trousers!), I realized that I was deliberately avoiding the eyes of those who were with me in the room, deliberately refraining from being too much aware of them. One was my wife, the other a man I respected and greatly liked; but both belonged to the world from which, for the moment, mescalin had delivered me "e world of selves, of time, of moral judgments and utilitarian considerations, the world (and it was this aspect of human life which I wished, above all else, to forget) of self-assertion, of cocksureness, of overvalued words and idolatrously worshiped notions.
At this stage of the proceedings I was handed a large colored reproduction of the well-known self-portrait by C6zanne-the head and shoulders of a man in a large straw hat, red-cheeked, red-lipped, with rich black whiskers and a dark unfriendly eye. It is a magnificent painting; but it was not as a painting that I now saw it. For the head promptly took on a third dimension and came to life as a small goblin-like man looking out through a window in the page before me. I started to laugh. And when they asked me why, "What pretensions!" I kept repeating. "Who on earth does he think he is?" The question was not addressed to Cezanne in particular, but to the human species at large. Who did they all think they were?
"It's like Arnold Bennett in the Dolomites," I said, suddenly remembering a scene, happily immortalized in a snapshot, of A.B., some four or five years before his death, toddling along a wintry road at Cortina d'Ampezzo. Around him lay the virgin snow; in the background was a more than gothic aspiration of red crags. And there was dear, kind, unhappy A.B., consciously overacting the role of his favorite character in fiction, himself, the Card in person. There he went, toddling slowly in the bright Alpine sunshine, his thumbs in the armholes of a yellow waistcoat which bulged, a little lower down, with the graceful curve of a Regency bow window at Brighton - his head thrown back as though to aim some stammered utterance, howitzer-like, at the blue dome of heaven. What he actually said, I have forgotten; but what his whole manner, air and posture fairly shouted was, "I'm as good as those damned mountains." And in some ways, of course, he was infinitely better; but not, as he knew very well, in the way his favorite character in fiction liked to imagine.
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. And the fact, the almost infinitely unlikely fact, of actually being Cezanne makes no difference. For the consummate painter, with his little pipeline to Mind at Large by-passing the brain valve and ego-filter, was also and just as genuinely this whiskered goblin with the unfriendly eye. For relief I turned back to the folds in my trousers. "This is how one ought to see," I repeated yet again. And I might have added,' 'These are the sort of things one ought to look at." Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of god.
"The nearest approach to this," I said, "would be a Vermeer."
Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was truly gifted-with the vision that perceives the Dharma-Body as the hedge at the bottom of the garden, with the talent to render as much of that vision as the limitations of human capacity permit, and with the prudence to confine himself in his paintings to the more manageable aspects of reality; for though Vermeer represented human beings, he was always a painter of still life. Cezanne, who told his female sitters to do their best to look like apples, tried to paint portraits in the same spirit. But his pippin-like women are more nearly related to Plato's Ideas than to the Dharma-Body in the hedge. They are Eternity and Infinity seen, not in sand or flower, but in the abstractions of some very superior brand of geometry. Vermeer never asked his girls to look like apples. On the contrary, he insisted on their being girls to the very limit - but always with the proviso that they refrain from behaving girlishly. They might sit or quietly stand but never giggle, never display self-consciousness, never say their prayers or pine for absent sweethearts, never gossip, never gaze enviously at other women's babies, never dirt, never love or hate or work. In the act of doing any of these things they would doubtless become more intensely themselves, but would cease, for that very reason, to manifest their divine essential Not-self. In Blake's phrase, the doors of Vermeer's perception were only partially cleansed. A single panel had become almost perfectly transparent; the rest of the door was still muddy. The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were in repose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless. In these circumstances Vermeer could see Suchness in all its heavenly beauty - could see and, in some small measure, render it-in a subtle and sumptuous still life. Vermeer is undoubtedly the greatest painter of human still lives.

We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new consciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation.
Hofmann, foreword

W. A. Stoll
In a uniform, extensive field, I kept seeing figures, which I tried to draw, but could get no farther than the crudest beginnings. I saw an extremely opulent sculptural ornamentation in constant metamorphosis, in continuous flux. I was reminded of every possible foreign culture, saw Mexican, Indian motifs. Between a grating of small beams and tendrils appeared little caricatures, idols, masks, strangely mixed all of a sudden with childish drawings of people. The tempo was slackened compared to the dark experiment.

            "Next, when we are describing
            A shape, or sound, or tint;
            Don't state the matter plainly,
            But put it in a hint;
            And learn to look at all things
            With a sort of mental squint."

Lewis Carroll, Poeta fit, non nascitur, v. 31 sq.

'I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard!' Alice
said at last. 'There ought to be some men moving about somewhere
--and so there are!' She added in a tone of delight, and her
heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. 'It's
a great huge game of chess that's being played--all over the
world--if this IS the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it
is! How I WISH I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn,
if only I might join--though of course I should LIKE to be a
Queen, best.'
Looking glass, ch. II

e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
O sweet spontaneous

              1O sweet spontaneous
              2earth how often have
              3the
              4doting

              5            fingers of
              6prurient philosophers pinched
              7and
              8poked

              9thee
            10, has the naughty thumb
            11of science prodded
            12thy

            13      beauty       .   how
            14often have religions taken
            15thee upon their scraggy knees
            16squeezing and

            17buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
            18gods
            19        (but
            20true

            21to the incomparable
            22couch of death thy
            23rhythmic
            24lover

            25          thou answerest

            26them only with

            27                          spring)

CHAPTER XII

Which Dreamed it?

'Your majesty shouldn't purr so loud,' Alice said, rubbing her
eyes, and addressing the kitten, respectfully, yet with some
severity. 'You woke me out of oh! such a nice dream! And you've
been along with me, Kitty--all through the Looking-Glass world.
Did you know it, dear?'

It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made
the remark) that, whatever you say to them, they ALWAYS purr.
'If them would only purr for "yes" and mew for "no," or any rule
of that sort,' she had said, 'so that one could keep up a
conversation! But how CAN you talk with a person if they always
say the same thing?'

On this occasion the kitten only purred: and it was impossible
to guess whether it meant 'yes' or 'no.'

So Alice hunted among the chessmen on the table till she had
found the Red Queen: then she went down on her knees on the
hearth-rug, and put the kitten and the Queen to look at each
other. 'Now, Kitty!' she cried, clapping her hands triumphantly.
'Confess that was what you turned into!'

('But it wouldn't look at it,' she said, when she was
explaining the thing afterwards to her sister: 'it turned away
its head, and pretended not to see it: but it looked a LITTLE
ashamed of itself, so I think it MUST have been the Red Queen.')

'Sit up a little more stiffly, dear!' Alice cried with a merry
laugh. 'And curtsey while you're thinking what to--what to
purr. It saves time, remember!' And she caught it up and gave
it one little kiss, 'just in honour of having been a Red Queen.'

'Snowdrop, my pet!' she went on, looking over her shoulder at
the White Kitten, which was still patiently undergoing its
toilet, 'when WILL Dinah have finished with your White Majesty, I
wonder? That must be the reason you were so untidy in my dream--
Dinah! do you know that you're scrubbing a White Queen?
Really, it's most disrespectful of you!

'And what did DINAH turn to, I wonder?' she prattled on, as she
settled comfortably down, with one elbow in the rug, and her chin
in her hand, to watch the kittens. 'Tell me, Dinah, did you turn
to Humpty Dumpty? I THINK you did--however, you'd better not
mention it to your friends just yet, for I'm not sure.

'By the way, Kitty, if only you'd been really with me in my
dream, there was one thing you WOULD have enjoyed--I had such a
quantity of poetry said to me, all about fishes! To-morrow
morning you shall have a real treat. All the time you're eating
your breakfast, I'll repeat "The Walrus and the Carpenter" to
you; and then you can make believe it's oysters, dear!

'Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all.
This is a serious question, my dear, and you should NOT go on
licking your paw like that--as if Dinah hadn't washed you this
morning! You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red
King. He was part of my dream, of course--but then I was part
of his dream, too! WAS it the Red King, Kitty? You were his
wife, my dear, so you ought to know--Oh, Kitty, DO help to
settle it! I'm sure your paw can wait!' But the provoking
kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard
the question.

Which do YOU think it was?

---

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July--

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear--

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream--
Lingering in the golden gleam--
Life, what is it but a dream?

THE END