ABSTRACT
We are standing at the edge of another space, swirling in a process that fuses ‘internal’ and ‘external’. Our words are speaking the unspoken and our vision sees the invisible. We stand in a kind of mist, yet the clarity of our vision has also increased. We hover in a web of movement. Our ‘external image’ glows in the clarity of its vibration, like moisture caught by the light in a moving cobweb. Seeing as we now see, with the whole organism, we resonate in that vibration; sharing the movement that constitutes our seeing. We see from both sides of the ‘external image’. We are the see-er and the seen. (For examples in literature where the fusion across this barrier is conveyed see Hesse, 1965; McDonald, 1971; Meyrink, 1972.) Quivering on this point, we must pause. We must draw our eyes away from the quiver long enough to bring to awareness elements of our experience that will deepen the quiver-add to its force of attraction that we feel already. Looking back over our shoulder, we cast an eye upon the trail left by our process. We find that more fusions have occurred. Our sight has begun to cross what we might call the ‘matter’—‘antimatter’ barrier. I use this distinction to indicate that the illusion of fixed ‘matter’ can no longer be sustained. Our seeing reflects the understandings arising out of relativity ‘which recognizes neither bare undifferentiated space by itself nor matter by itself but rather ‘the intuition of a spatial manifold’, where ‘matter is considered and treated…as an “outgrowth of the field”’ (Cassirer, 1953, p. 397). Matter and space are no longer seen as mutually exclusive (Jammer, 1969, pp. 11, 132, 138; see also the debate between Thom, Prigogine and Morin, Réponses: Morin, E., ‘Audelà du déterminisme: le dialogue de l’ordre et du désordre’; Prigogine, I., ‘Loi, histoire…et desertion’, Le Débat, no. 6, November, Gallimard, pp. 104-30). We are no longer seeing other people and other life-forms either solely or primarily as solid and staticized ‘matter’. As we begin to sense in vision processes emanating to and from forms of ‘matter’, we can no longer so clearly divide these as ‘objects’. Instead, we are seeing a merging process, an inter-action. Since the word ‘interaction’ in everyday usage tends to convey action between-the assumption being that each constituent element is by nature separated, the within of each being thus still held separate from the process-I have split the word in order to convey a simultaneous interflow of and alteration in the nature of the two withins. These are not now held back from the process. ‘Matter’ emerges from and sinks back into that ‘antimatter’ which we now see as constantly permeating phenomena. As a term to describe our expanded visibility, it denotes an alteration in the quality of space. By activating our capacity to shift focus, this mode of space now comes in out of its invisibility. Because perception and self are mutually constituting, there is a simultaneous alteration in the ‘self’. Instead of a separated ‘internal’ and ‘external’ we stand on both sides
of the mirror, as now do phenomena. We see from both ‘sides’ simultaneously. This does not mean, as our fears scream with their imposed meanings of the ‘natural attitude’, that the old enclosed ‘self’ now forecloses also that realm beyond us, that madness now engulfs us. Instead, both seeing and self unfreeze and expand. Sight becomes an active mingling. That movement permeates and is seen to constitute ‘objects’; ‘matter’. That fusion moves constantly around us and through us, in which we ourselves are constantly constituted and reconstituted, in which we see ourselves constitute and reconstitute each other.
