I am that which isn't there

Look Again

When I look in a looking-glass
How is it that it comes to pass
What is it, too, that there I see
The looking-glass, myself or me?

If caged alone, the turtle dies;
but if he in reflection spies
His image in a glass, he lives;
Such is the food illusion gives.

So when I see you face to face,
Seeming your person there to trace;
What do I see there - which is true? -
The world, part of myself, or you?

You see yourself and I see you;
Only through me do you see you;
While you see me, I myself see,
Only through you do I see me.

Of all the points of vanishing
In the perspective of the world
That opposite to me is present
And I am that which isn't there.

***

When I look at a looking-glass, what do I see - the looking-glass my face or me? When I look at the world, what do I see - the world, my perception or me? When I look at you, what do I see - you or part of my unknown self?

***

A deep inward experience is shared and cannot be unshared. Desire to share - it comes, perhaps, from intrusion into reflexion upon the separateness of self and others, which is dissolve in deep inward experience. Reflection comes afterwards and is done from standpoint of separateness. Separateness is unsharable. One might put it this way: such inward experiences cannot be unshared precisely because they are by their very nature inward sharing, but they cannot be directly communicated upon reflection in separateness, and so desire to "share" them may arise from overlooking the fact that they are already shared by their nature.

Bodies (mental or physical) are what separates ( and with them words and spatial nearness) some feelings draw the separate together and partly dissolve it; consciousness unites in a-unity. Separateness implies unity, unity implies separateness; there is no final satisfaction or solution here as long each craves for or dreads the other.

***

There are certain aspects of truth that one can discover in oneself; if one is told of them, one will certainly, and in the very nature of existence itself, reject them absolutely. But perhaps they can be shared by those who have discovered them individually for themselves, and perhaps those who have not discovered them can be aided indirectly to discover them for themselves. (The use of the word "truth" here is in the sense of desirability of discovery).

***

I sit down in a room, quiet and half dark and watch the act of breathing - the bodily sensation of air touching the tip of the nose: I experience sensing the bodily sensation at an interval of space. I can place the bodily sensation in space as sensed from the direction in which I am. But when I follow that direction back and look for the "I", then I am no longer there, but in another place, I have no place in space. I see and sense space and the "things" in it from a place where I am not. Space is complete without "I" and there is no room for "I" in space at all. This I call the inner vertigo.