Hum Hum Mahakalaprasidepraside Hrim Hrim Svaha
We swing back and forth between worlds, between intent and effect. Between anything and everything. We carve a geometric trail of causality, a nostalgic harmonography of thoughts rippling to the edge of the universe, to the borders of our imagination - just to look back at us, and acknowledge our existence and importance in this vast unknown of mirrored selves.
Acknowledging a self-reflection in the blackest of all cosmic mirrors, the non-self, in a manner akin to Fichte’s “Science of Knowledge”, where the "I" and the "Not-I" are mutually dependent. The non-self is given structure and meaning through its relationship with the self, and likewise, the self becomes aware of itself only through its engagement with the non-self.
Voided by an unforgiving Mahākāla, or perhaps an old black hole absorbing all that it attracts, all that it stumbles upon. A metaphorical mirror to reveal the self from the other, the known from the unknown. An act of ultimate absorption, where the self is needed no more, and stripped of its phenomenology. Not unseen because it is hidden, but because it transcends, it changes, it transforms.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot — Emil Cioran
And, the more we reflect, the more we reach a critical point of no return, allowing only a precession of thoughts. A gradual realignment or transformation: just as Foucault’s pendulum plane of oscillation would temporarily loop back due to external forces, so too could the immobile of one's self core be influenced by the ever-changing dynamics of experience, culture, and intellectual exploration. By causality, and stillness, too.
But is this causality embodied or is as illusory as the rest of it all? In either case, using reflection, and determinacy to achieve indeterminacy is as useful as is counter-intuitive: to stand in a perpetual stillness of experiences and thoughts, in an eternal contemplation. To understand, to become.
Alan Watts would often point out the irony and difficulty in trying to be purposefully purposeless. For example, if one meditates with the goal of achieving enlightenment, then the very act of striving for enlightenment could be a hindrance to achieving it. In this way, the "purpose" (enlightenment, inner peace, etc.) can become an obstacle to the "purposeless" state one is trying to achieve.
For the man who stands still in the middle of the universe, everything is defined by what he can perceive - with his senses, with his imagination. Beyond this power of observation, there is potentiality and probability, the expectation of a reality suited for human consciousness matched by an equal measurement of its intent, that has yet to be discovered or invented. Thus, the geometer leaves it to the man of science to decide, as best he may, what axioms are most nearly true in the actual world. 1
But do not forget: the changing of bodies into light and light into bodies, is comfortable to the course of nature, which seems delighted with transmutations2. Changing states between noumenon and phenomenon, between particle and wave, all come from nothing and to nothing returns. With the amplitude of our intention and, oscillation: none.
Intro: the mantra of Mahākāla — the God of Time, Maya, Creation, Destruction, and Power. The word Mahākāla is a Sanskrit word: Maha means ‘Great’ and Kala refers to ‘Time or Death’; therefore Mahakala means “Beyond time or Death” (Mukherjee, 1988)
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
Sir Isaac Newton