The Ever-Present Origin - Michael Goodnight - Editor

dream-like and somnolent aspects and precipitates their separation. Thedividing deed leads to death: the death of man and his entire culture.Wakefulness, then, is not adequate, least of all the attitude of all-ornothingwakefulness. Clarity, however, is adequate, for it alone is free ofbrightness, twilight, and darkness, and is able to penetrate the wholewhere somnolent timelessness, somnial temporicity, and mentalconceptuality all become diaphanous. Anyone who perceives in thismanner is free from time and can see through the whole in which hepartakes, not as a part, but integrally.The Ever-present Origin. Part OneChapter 12The Concretion of the SpiritualWhatever happens on the earth - man must share the responsibility. Butthe earth itself is not just something here and now; it is no more thecenter of the universe than is the sun. Both the heliocentric and thegeocentric world-views have become obsolete in favor of the whole which,since it is not spatially localizable, has no center. What happens to theearth - and the earth is nothing but an event which in materialization hasbecome progressively slower - originates in more encompassing andspatio-temporally non-localizable interconnections.It is also a star among stars, just as humans are only human among otherhuman beings. On its great journey across the millennia it hastens throughthe changing landscapes of "heaven," transforming its own countenanceand man's. In man, who is the consciousness of the earth and itsinterconnections with distances and proximities, the influences whichaffect our entire solar system as one system among many have theirenduring effect. All efforts to conceive of these factors in spatial andtemporal terms are futile, and yet it is certain that they can be realized byus in a space-time free manner.Of course, nothing that exists exists for its own sake; it exists for the sakeof the whole: In origin, the whole is pregiven for man; it takes on for manits conscious character in the time-free present, for consciousness is notrestricted to time and space. It cannot be concretized in conceptualitysince conceptuality deals only with abstractions and absolutes. It can befathomed only dimly in vital, magic life, and is realizable throughimagination and experience, as in myth and mysticism, only in a twilight ofconsciousness. It is approached in thought, but thought immediatelycloses itself off since in its process of deduction discursive thought alwaysexcludes any openness in its compulsion to system.The new mutation of consciousness, on the other hand, as a consequenceof arationality, receives its decisive stamp from the manifest perceptualemergence of the spiritual. (The poets' rejection of the psychic and mentalaspects as a "source" of poetic creation, as discussed in chapter 3, section74