🪟 Transcript 40 - We are eternal beings pt. II

Transcript #40 (Part 5): The material and metaphysical in relation to time and eternity.

Table of contents

PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.

1. Solutions of right framing

2. Perpetually incomplete datasets

3. The potency of stories

4. The brilliance of ordinary language

5. Perpetual imbalance

6. The tyranny of socialisation

7. Authenticity and the problem of self

8. Know thyself to be not a god

PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.

1. Metaframing

2. Into the unknown

3. Peaks and troughs

4. Gratitude for things as a whole

5. Judgement Day

6. The pursuit of emptiness (happiness)

7. The Narrator

8. The Actor

9. Boundaries of infinity

PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.

1. Sentient mirrors

2. Relations of mirror frames

3. Artistic purity

4. The speck in your brother’s eye

5. Beyond contentment

6. Roots of sanity

7. He Who Forgets

8. The frame of love

PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS

1. Love as consciousness

2. Playtime with solipsism

3. Entering the psychical universe

4. The Mythical Crisis

5. Inner Space Exploration

6. Being and Quietude

7. Infinite synchronicity

8. The Birth and Development of Inwardness

9. Testimony for the existential

PART 5: IDEALS

1. Crossroads

2. The cosmic origin of despair

3. The cosmic origin of despair pt. II

4. Authenticity and the problem of self pt. II

5. We are eternal beings

6. We are eternal beings pt. II

🪟 40 - We are eternal beings pt. II

‘Old books with candle’ by Konstantinos Skopelitis

Perhaps we resemble living, breathing storybooks. Our stories are penned and read in time. Yet at the same time, our stories are forged together from a point of view outside time. How can something in time be, at the same time, outside time? Picture yourself reading a work of literature. You may be at page 2 in book-time, but in story-time you are at the genesis of the universe. Or, you may be at page 52 in book-time, but in story-time you are encountering the span of twenty thousand years.

Within book-time, there is the material object and the event of the materiality. The material object, the noun—the book—contains pages and chapters. We say, ‘page 52, chapter 6’. On the other hand, the event of the materiality, the verb—the writing and reading—contains the subjective interaction with the material: the opening and closing of the book, folding and turning of the pages. We say, ‘flip over to the last page’. All of this occurs in the world of book-time. Book-time is rather simple. It is the world of the objective, the material, the tangible, the finite—the shapes, squiggles and lines we see in the present moment with our eyes to all around us. This world pays no heed to meaning, only to the sense experience of the immediate.

On the other hand, there is story-time. This is the interaction with the world of the story that is made concrete and held together by that book. Rather astoundingly (as I feel when I really put my imagination to it), the world of the story is one that is not limited or confined to the material. It is one that weaves into all branches of infinite time, from which it pours itself out onto the paper book. This means that when we interact with the book (in book-time), what we are really interacting with is the story—penetrating through the window of the book in book-time. Story-time enters the world of sense experience from the intangible world, endowing meaning upon the book, breathing life into it.

Certainly, it is only by the physical world of sense experience—by the slow but unrelenting ticking of book-time—that we can experience anything at all. Yet, while the story expresses itself through book-time as such, story-time does not tick in nearly the same way as book-time (this is the astounding element). In a peculiar way the hands of its clock are absolutely unhinged. To it, all of time—the past, present and future—is accessible and manipulable, as if something in our psyche came with a spare part from a wrong dimension, a higher one: of an omni-dimensional origin. Not only that, the present time as we know it is formed by this omni-dimensional capacity, it is not formed alone in and of itself (even though it carries the appearance as such); it is the meeting-in-the-middle of the web of time that reaches and extends infinitely. Hence, the present time is given an incalculable ‘subjective’ meaning that crosses the boundaries of the present time (in materiality) by far. The great story-world permeates the book, in doing so expanding its significance exponentially, through the glass walls of sense experience, into infinitude. The “present moment” expands to indiscernible breadths. As imaginary worlds are to paper pages, so the story vastly surmounts the material finitude of the book, breathing an infinite consciousness into what is originally finite—which is, comparatively speaking, as animals are to rocks: life to the lifeless.

If the story is the life of a book—well then, without a story, what is a book for? I think this is now reasonable to say: a book would have no good reason to exist if there wasn’t a story for it to contain. Correspondingly, the body would have no good reason to exist if there wasn’t a soul/mind/psyche for it to contain. (I will use the word “soul” from here. It is ancient and well-documented, even if our contemporaries have lost their taste for it.) But in truth, this judgement I am pronouncing here—of “what is it for” or “a good or bad reason to exist”—is in the first place in relation to a problem of justification, which means, it is asked in the mode of the story—the mode of the eternal subjectivity—and not in the mode of the book—the mode of immediate objectivity. The problem posed itself presupposes and affirms the mode of being within which it becomes apparent. It pertains to the mode of story-time, since it is not a problem of actuality, but of meaning—or to be more precise, the possibility of a meaning, which is permeated with the full weight of the past and future. If one existed properly in the mode of the immediate present time, in complete isolation from the past and future, such questions would be irrelevant and nonsensical.

In this way, the life of a book is contingent on its story. The life of a book is contingent on its story; the life of the means is contingent on its end; the life of the machine is contingent on its goal; the life of the body (as we know and treat it) is contingent on its soul. The cosmic breath of life (so to speak) is the breath of the soul into the body that delivers our finitude over to the infinite. This is what is alluded to in the allegory of Genesis, before the fall: “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature”. Without the breath of subjectivity that penetrates the material flesh with infinitude, the flesh would be lifeless, for it would be without meaning; not only that, meaning itself would be without meaning.

Now, to leap an absurd way further, what if there was a book without a story? What if there was a human being without the eternal and infinite, without meaning nor the compulsion to meaning; in other words, without a soul? Now, this is a terribly hard thought to think, even conceptually. The infinite is so formative to our being that it is impossible to imagine a fully finite existence without undoing our own minds. Without the infinite, we would be another creature entirely, quite inhuman, quite unimaginable to ourselves. What is a body without a soul? What is a human being without a possibility for meaning? A pure object, a pure flesh; a means without an ends, a machine without a goal. Of course, still at the end of the day, it is only an end-less means and a goal-less machine insofar as it is posed by the inundated subject to whom such problems amount to anything at all. Whereas the object on the other hand persists in time lifelessly, like a rock on a mountain, or a blade of grass on farmland, possessing not even the slightest note of an eternal awareness to wait to be kicked or eaten. But the subject penetrates the object, injecting its own infinite viewpoint into it—though he or she remains persistent in immediate time, is given over unwittingly to mediate all of time. Case in point, humans are the only ones who proactively wait to die. All of this goes to say just one thing. I have said it before, and I will continue to say it. We are eternal beings.