Rimbaudian Meditations (i.-vii.)

i.

• “The more differences one perceives and integrates, the closer one’s apprehension will be to Sameness. However, focusing on the Sameness itself would be destructive to one’s Action or production of ‘meaning in the world’ (Wert-in-Welt) –it would be anti-tikkunolamic to reject all limits after having understood their illusive nature– so, the dérèglement de tous les sens, as a transcendence of ossified consciousness, deconstructs one’s self so as to reconstruct it in a new light of multiplied perspectives. In the bending of solipsism’s liminality, whichever epiphanies the self-actualizing project can lead to, will be echoed by Reason, but the practice itself must transcend the faculty of ratiocination without forgetting it: just as the astral body transcends the physical one, with an immanent chain that remains between them –a silvered anchor forged out of immortal æther.”

ii.

• “The omnipresence of Beauty as a poetic intuition is an aesthetic resonance between the subject and the Object, where the vibrations can be strong enough to shatter the boundaries between the Former and Latter into union. One cannot restrain Loving the outside world as much as the inner. It is a moment of directly experiencing the flow of Poetry in all things; your Lebenswelt becomes Poetry and you live in it. But, such a state can only occur in ἔκστασις (ekstasis), where euphoria permeates every taste that your tongue reaches for. You must exit your-Self and see it in everything, then, every color that your pupil swallows will become as true as the irises of your lover. Lock eyes with Reality; let your heart beat rhythms which ‘you and your circumstance’ can dance to.”
• “When Beauty is understood as a feeling and nothing else, any speculations concerning its source or location, transmute themselves into confusion. Beauty cannot be analyzed, it exists in perpetual synthesis as a feeling; a feeling, that, when it manifests in the subject within speech, should only be felt and recognized as a guide for the spirit: it will act as the psychopomp for existing (or Being). Beauty is loving, these two experiences run parallel to one another and are intrinsically related. Now, what is Goodness and what is Truth? The threefold essence of the highest virtue may be equally as sweet, but each quintessence does not taste the same.”

iii.

• “If Learning requires enormous spans of time, it is because of the obscene amount of conceptions that thinkers have put into words. Ideas which fight for recognition as knowledge in the battlefield of History. Language plays a big role in the diasporic nature of Truth, where many have made attempts at capturing Her but no tool has ever fully sufficed –nor will it. In the generations of humans that have walked the Earth, only the ones that felt the implications of our Condition stepped into the Godhead to come back with grains of sand. History is the mythical hammerkop that recollects these grains to make dunes of Ideas –heaps of letters that get blown away by the lungs of the Chaos that synthesizes.”

iv.

• “The answers for the speculations on the Spirit lie in the praxis of phenomenology, where one aligns with the epistemic nature and limits of the human experience –the answer is found in the acceptance that we have no direct access to what is outside of our consciousness. Deciding to take breaths, in ἐποχή (epokhē), is to survive the passive submersion in a continuous stream of waking semiosis; it implies a rebellion against the tyranny of Signs, an inescapable struggle in the unending swim to the shore of Physis.”

v.

• “The axiological telos of life, like the ethos of pure understanding, requires the joining of Concept and Experience; the yogic purpose is to reconcile our body with our mind, in an effort to achieve sophrosyne between biological constraints that imitate the static mirage of matter. Knowing, i.e., conception, and Being, i.e., perception, ought to join together under Existence: Episteme in the mind and the body in Physis existing in an inevitably ethical practopoiesis –the ideal techne: the philosopher’s stone. Existence may precede itself after all.”

vi.

• “We cannot say that reality is directly absurd; reality is only absurd in relation to our interpretation of it. What becomes absurd, thus, is the interpretation itself –that is, the judgment of the world being absurd or meaningless– because it is a futile attempt at describing reality. Reality only becomes absurd when comparing the concept-less physical reality before you with the concept-full subjective reality that you attribute yourself to and associate with the reality in front of you. Judgment forgets that reality is intrinsically neutral –that it is a form of nothingness which mediates your exchange of angst in favor of bliss.”

vii.

• “If Mind permeates every aspect of reality –or, if every aspect of reality were to resonate the dynamics of the mind– the credibility of mysticism and spiritual techniques increases. When one dies, one dissolves into absolute consciousness. The possibility of ‘the soul’ appeals to the inclusion of a metaphysical essence (human consciousness) –which would fill many gaps– however, the soul cannot be individualized at a fundamental level as it is an ontological dynamic rather than an essence; the soul is infinite and congruent to consciousness, i.e., the soul can only exist as Ātman; which identifies Brahman (and vice versa). As a concept, the soul, is far more useful as metaphor in poetry rather than in philosophy. But, if we were to probe the soul as a metaphysical entity, how does one reconcile the individuality of it with the infinity of Consciousness? –We cannot achieve it. If anything, the individuality of the soul could be discernable in a psycho-epistemic reincarnation –existing in haecceity– and running the risk of only being a theosophic superstition. What type of hubris assumes that ‘I’ am worthy of eternity outside of the ramifications of memory?”

The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1771.