Closing and Meditations

Closing

These Exercises have been linear and sequential and we have recommended that the initiate follow them in order and chronology, while simultaneously recognizing that her physiology and temperament may demand some modifications.

The initiate is now finished the Exercises and is free to create within the chains of the universe.  We shall close by offering a few remarks.

In becoming the world, she is the world, and creation is effortless, spontaneously erupting from the fullness of desire.  Effortful creation involves the will and, while common, is not the creation which these Exercises are dedicated to.  The initiate has become an artist - a world-reflecting mirror - to internalize creation, its energy, desire, to stuff creation deep into herself as fuel for her factory of transformation.

The artist should not, however, forget that she is partial, that the universe is filtered through her partiality, and that her perspective, her creation, no matter how full and rich, is limited.  Not only this, but her creation is but one reflection of the world in a world of reflections.  She adds a mirror to the madhouse of mirrors into which we all are born to meander, and some will see the world, but only some, and many will never see at all - not the world, neither the mirror nor themselves.  Each body, object, will, star, mind, book, soul, picture, is a mirror mirroring mirrors; the artist reflects reflections and is nothing to become the everything she sees.

We have, over the course of five phases and fifteen years, exploring the five aspects of the person and the primary manifestations of each aspect, traversed the world and lived.  Where among these aspects is the artist’s home?  Is it her body, contradictory, peaceful, passionate?  Is it her will, outward, concrete, restless?  Is it her mind, controlling, dual?  Her soul, bottomless, silent?  Or her judgement, contextual, critical, compassionate?

Each aspect claims to be; when in each aspect, each claim feels as right.  Each aspect claims primacy over all the others and says I am the foundation of the world, even as each person begins, and often ends, by saying I am its centre.  Each aspect strives to suck each other aspect into its hungry swirling vortex and birth a tree from which they are its branches and it the root.  And the reader will find easy defense of this perspective.  For there are those who write and paint and sing and dance and live and preach from each.  You will find them everywhere:  they may be considered good or evil, wise or foolish; they may have status or be pitied, they may wear a thousand disguises.  But beneath the world’s considerations, you will find an aspect saying - the world is me.  Learn to detect the myriad masks, the craft and curve of words, the ballroom of ideas.  Learn from them what you can, but be wary of them.  They are specialists; none have accepted life.

Do not scorn them.  Life is difficult and each aspect offers some security from the dark places into which we’ve peered, their cold and silent winds, that death.

Further, while each aspect has its articulate proponents, its leaders, sages, thieves, among them some who shed new invigorating light on a portion of the world, light to be basked in and used by the graduates of these Exercises, for every one of these, a million more exist who simply copy, further carve, dissect, the aspects’ charms, who rotely mumble the necessary lines, until the world is anatomized to fragments, glorious shards of a glorious whole.  For isn’t even the least fragment part of the whole and by becoming the whole, the artist develops the ability to see the whole in each through her vision that sees as readily what is not as is.

We, each one of us, desire a ruler, and each aspect waits in readiness to fulfil us.  Let those whom such rulers find live in worthy subjection; let the artist neither ridicule them nor attempt to convert them to her subjection.  If she has truly lived these Exercises, she will know that each is necessary, that the parts feed the whole and without them the world does not exist.  She will know that her role, while of the world and mirrors and rare, is but one role among them all, the role that excludes nothing and in such inclusion does not rule or seek to be.

Her subjection though?  Yes, she is subjected, but to the world, not to any aspect of it.  It is this totality of her subjection that frees her and why we can rightly say she is not ruled, this not ruling only by virtue of her being ruled.

The artist may also be or become inclined to think, in moments of regression, that although she is not subject to one aspect, that no particular is her home, that she moves freely among all aspects as the spirit blows, that she is the one who rules her aspects, that they are her tools to use.  But who is this she?  Who is this ruler we have posited behind the aspects?  What is her name?  No!  If there be a ruler behind the aspects, it is nameless, formless, empty, dark, silent, and so no ruler, or at least no ruler we can see or speak or think of.

The you you say rules the aspects does not exist, for what are you other than they?  Where does the desire to select a ruler come from?  It comes from each, being itself.  How do you live without a ruler?  You live as an artist, you live as you were meant to be.  You live, each aspect alive and screaming, saying I am the one; do not attempt to silence them, let them scream.  One, to the extent that it exists is the only one that exists, does not speak or assert or scream; it is not an aspect, but the aspects fully lived.  One is the artist.  One creates.

Creation, of the kind of which we speak, does not emerge from any other number; only one.  But one is not the one that attempts to bring into itself, but the one that affirms each one so attempting.  No greater love has one than this:  than to devote oneself to such affirmation.

So the initiate is purified through acceptance and reflection into an artist and becomes the becoming that is.

Meditations

We offer the following meditations, which the artist may choose to utter, as summary reflections.

I am the world and the world is i.

I peer through the world as one might peer through a fly’s eye.

This being the world and this peering is my vision; I live to articulate my vision.

The gap between my vision and its articulation is infinite and my sense of this infinity is my grief and exuberance.  This gap destroys and fuels me; if I should reduce the fullness of this tension, I risk accelerated destruction.

Nothing can be against me, for, being the world, everything is of me.

I am comprised of five aspects:  body, will, mind, soul, judgement, all of which are equal, all of which flow through all.  Each aspect is ruled by itself and there is no ruler that can stand outside another aspect and rule it, for no aspect understands the other, being a distinct totality.  

Nevertheless, each aspect can inform the other, not through itself or the other, but through experience.  Thus only through living are the aspects united.

I create not from any aspect, but from living and having lived.  I create from the impossible unity of life.

As a creator, I do not exist above, outside or under life, but in it.  As such, I am not greater or lesser than another part of life, but have my own role to play.

The role of all creators is the same - to reflect the world.  I reflect and in reflecting become a mirror.  I am a mirror and in being a mirror reflect.  To the extent that all five aspects are fully alive in me, I am a polished mirror, and all aspects and particularities of the world are contained within me at all times.

Because of this containment, I stand outside of morality, indifferent and capricious.  As a creator, I obtain the attributes once given to God.  Having a body, I am moral, for I am a creature and am chained to the world.  I die and because I die and know death I have compassion.  If I should resist my divinity, I cannot create.  If I should resist my death, I cannot have compassion.  I am god and beast and only by being both shall I extend my humanity to the passion at earth’s core and the stars’ aloof fire.

By not diminishing any aspect, I become the energy of creation and from this energy I create.

By not diminishing any aspect, I remain in perpetual tension and this tension is the fire with which I burn.

By not diminishing any aspect, I give myself over to the world.  I neither deny nor attempt to control any aspect, but allow each aspect its fulfillment when the informed totality of my person permits it; in this way, I do not resent my chains, for I am chained to the world and not to any portion of it.  Yet in allowing each aspect its fulfillment, through necessity spread through time, I am driven not by any aspect or any portion therein, but by the nothingness I have seen, and the vision inherent in that sight.

I am grateful for having glimpsed nothingness and lived.  I am grateful for the resultant vision and am, most truly, that vision.

I accept the world and all it contains, without exception, there being no qualifiers other than those already existent in the world, and there being counter-qualifiers to each of these, these too already existent.  And so it goes, on and on.  And so I am, a creator-speck in an ancient lineage, stretching from God to God, a spark in the darkness.