Year Fifteen

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept Judgement and Mirror the Judgement of the World

Fifteenth Year:  Acceptance

In this final year, the initiate consummates the path of falling she has been on in years six, nine and twelve.  In year six, she removed her structures in the world; in year nine, she removed her structures in the mind; in year twelve, she removed the structures in her heart; in this fifteenth year, she will focus on maintaining this non-structure in herself, and in this maintenance of nothingness receive all her structure from the world.

The reader may think that in this no-structure that is the structure of the world, the initiate removes herself from the world.  This is true only when compared to those who equate self with activity and control, or at least the attempt at control.  But there is a self that undergirds the talking moving self; as have consistently argued, we do not propose that the initiate ultimately give up her talking moving self or that she attempt to control that active self¾we have only proposed these things for specific times, but rather that she find the undergirding self and use that self to embrace the talking moving self and in this embraced totality become a mirror to the world.  This fifteenth year is the final polishing of the mirror, in which the initiate should have no structures remaining to deconstruct, as in the previous years of falling, but can focus on reflection.

Rather than losing herself, as might be the fear of the reader, she finds herself.  Rather than diminishing herself, she enlarges herself.  Rather than becoming less than the world, she becomes the world.  Such is the function of the mirror and such is the nature of the artist we describe.

A common practice of those who fear they will lose themselves¾and such ones are many¾is that the world in its manifold largeness will gobble them up.  Well, in a sense, this is inevitably true, as the world includes death and death is a gobbler, perfect in execution, the only authentic democrat.  It also remains true, in a different sense, when such an approach is taken.  For the individual one in his minisculeness is always gobbled up by the world in its gargantuan myriad ungraspability.  But the seeker can, by following these Exercises, by living and falling, hide herself not in a portion of the world¾the approach of technique, specialization, and edifices, of rock and stone¾but in the universe itself.  If the initiate has followed these Exercises and been one so called to follow them, she will be a mirror of the universe and thus can hide herself in it without losing herself, for how can I lose myself in myself? How can a tree lose itself in itself?

So the activity of this year is to reflect, to hide and to become, and in these unpopular verbs, the initiate will perhaps be ready to create.