Sean Reagan

Say that I take a picture of you, and set it next to you. Now I have you and an image of you.

If I want to feed you – bake you bread, make you tea – I will not place sustenance before the photograph.

If I want to hold you or walk with you, I will not cradle or sidle the photograph.

You are not the image of you.

If we throw the photograph into a fire, you do not burn. If we throw it into a lake, you don’t drown.

This is clear to the point of silly, right? The photograph is an image of you and you are not the image.

Now say that the embodied self – the one I feed and hold and walk beside – is also an image. On this view, the photograph is an image of an image.

But if this is so, then what is that image – the embodied self – an image of?

That is, the photograph is an image of your body, which is your external appearance to an observer (who could be your own self). But if your body is also an image, then of what is it an image?

Here I am going to dodge a little, but playfully. Here I will say that your body – that vivid, three-dimensional, pulsating loveliness – is a distinction which arises when any observer (which must include you) distinguishes “you” from all that is “not-you.”

{in this way you bring forth – for me – love}

On that view, you – your body, your appearance – is a cleft in the void, a brief seam in the indivisible wholeness that is God, pure emptiness and plenitude, not-one-and-not-two, one-without-another and not-one-without-another . . .

Of course, this is all experienced as your body (as an image, an appearance) by my body. “A cleft in the void, a brief seam in the indivisible wholeness that is God, pure emptiness and plenitude et cetera” is poetic wisdom or nonsense, according to whether it helpfully points in the direction of – facilitates, really – entering directly intimately this experience of image-intimating-God.

If I have a photograph of you – an image – I will tend to the image with love, because it reflects you, right? I don’t throw it in the fire or in the lake. I don’t desecrate it.

But I don’t confuse the image with you, the embodied you, the you that I walk with, bake bread with and sit quietly before the fire with.

In the same way, given the actual you, the embodied you, the sit-by-the-fire you, I am patient, gentle, helpful and kind (according to my limits, which are legion), again, because the embodied you reflects – indicates in its partialness – God.

{for our partialness is holiness, our appearance itself is Christ forever indicating the generative God out of which all appearance rises}

The image hints. It points at what gives rise to it. Appearances, too, hint. They arouse a desire to know fully, wholly, directly, intimately the other, who is our own self, which is also a hint, an appearance longing for the other. The world is constituted, is brought forth, by this mutual reflexive longing, the self forever seeking itself in the other – the multiplicity of others – all of whom are intimations of God, Wholeness, Generative Emptiness, the Divine Et Cetera and Holy Et Alia et cetera.

{for the world is always the brim, always spilling, always the horizontal refulgence, the eclipse that never eclipses, the shirt that never fully falls to the floor but hangs suspended in half-light, angel and ghost, holiness and haunt, here and not-here both}

At the level of the image – the appearance – which is the level of distinguishing, of distinction – there is only ever longing, the existence of which is contingent on never being fully satisfied, fully met, or fully given and received.

Yet by entering longing – by giving attention to its moisty circularity – one glimpses – tastes – God, which is both void and plenitude, timeless and formless, before and after and outside language and also the radiant essence always speaking, forever bringing forth the joy and peace that surpasses understanding in love: this love: this you, always you.

In “You Have to Be Two to Start: Rational Thoughts About Love” Ernst Von Glasersfeld makes an interesting observation which is that in order to experience love, “you have to be two.” That is, what is one has to construct an other – become two – and then be in relationship with that other in order to know love.

This relates to George Spencer-Brown’s notion – supported by his weird but rigorous algebra – that the universe is capable of seeing itself, but in order to do so must cleave itself into a part that sees and a part that is seen. It distinguishes itself from itself.

But Spencer-Brown points out that since the universe is not actually distinct from itself, any division is always partial and thus, in its partiality, is false to itself. It hints at oneness, but is never actual oneness.

That is, so long as we are experiencing self and other, we might catch glimpses or intimations of oneness, and these hints might be comforting or orgasmic or exhilarating, but they are never actual oneness, no matter how intense or apparently persuasive.

Von Glasersfeld’s analysis makes clear that love is not a mystical union wherein two separate parts become one such that the separate parts are no longer separately identifiable. Rather, it is a common-sense art two (or more) separate parts practice out of a shared desire to see and share with the other.

We are self and other precisely because what is one – what distinguished by us as self and other – desires love. In this sense, the appearance of separation is the literal form of desire.

As von Glasersfeld understands it, insisting that love be “mystical” or “spiritual” can actually impede our experience of it.

I have reached the conclusion that there is a widespread illusion that makes the continued existence of love impossible. As long as children are brought up to believe that love just happens like a magic spell which comes from outside and creates and perpetuates itself, then it cannot function. Love – as Ovid pointed out long ago – is an art. It has to be constantly created and requires persistent vigilance, care, and thoughtfulness.

Given the appearance of self and other, we must become responsible unto the implicit – the apparently embodied – desire for love.

In this sense, a “mystic” is really someone who has learned that unity is our shared fundament and then does the hard work of sharing that learning and practicing it with others (broadly defined so as to include sunflowers, pine trees, oceans and stars et cetera) each of whom could be our very own self. Thus, as von Glasersfeld points out, to be loving always includes an ethical responsibility unto the other.

The partner is always what we experience of him or her. We have abstracted him or her from our own experiences and therefore he or she is our construction and not, for example, a thing in itself which exists independently from us.

Everyone and everything that we encounter is a distinction that we – ourselves distinctions – make. To be “mystical” is to perceive in a sustainable ongoing way the underlying unity inhering in our apparently disparate experiences.

I suggest that the sustainability of this insight necessarily makes us radical peace activists. When we perceive love as the fundament, then we also see clearly how so many of the models and systems used to instantiate and maintain justice, equity and peace and so forth are broken and dysfunctional and so must be discarded and replaced.

This is true when it comes to caged children at the southern border of the United States, hungry women and men living without shelter, and reliance on non-local and corporate food producers to eat.

Thus we contemplate and study oneness but we are also seeking to bring love forth in the actual apparent circumstances of our living. To paraphrase Henri Nouwen, a mystic who is not making the world a better place has only learned half the lesson, and the radical peace activist who is not aware of her unity with all life has likewise only learned half the lesson.

Learning half the lesson does not mean that we cannot be happy but it does mean that deep joy and inner peace, and a world free of hatred and fear, remain ideals that are only occasionally sampled, rather than sustainable mainstays of our shared living.

Jesus was a revolutionary who did not become an extremist since he did not offer an ideology, but himself. He was also a mystic who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense, he also remains for men and women of the nuclear age the way to liberation and freedom (Nouwen Seeds of Hope 220).

I do not suggest these are easy lessons to learn, nor hold myself out as an exemplary student. The way is arduous, if less so than we were taught. It takes attention; it takes commitment.

Like you, I work not from a sense of superiority or spiritual excellence, but from a sense of duty and humility in which learning is ongoing. The return of love unto love is cyclical. We are never going to “graduate;” we are not travelers who will one day arrive at a place called Heaven. There is nobody who “wakes up” or becomes “enlightened.”

More and more I see the work of love as akin to gardening and homesteading, wherein we work cooperatively with one another and with the earth to bring forth sustenance in the form of a cycle which nurtures body, plant and earth as one.

We might identify with one aspect of the cycle more than another – we might even appear to be one aspect of the cycle (gardener rather than plant, say) – but what matters is the attention and devotion we give to our ongoing experience of the cycle. Plants and soil are attentive, too. If we aren’t noticing this, then we aren’t noticing love in its fullness.

So here – where I live and study and act – we trade and barter for seeds. We compost as much as possible and return it to our gardens and the gardens of our neighbors. We grow mostly what feeds us (kale, potatoes, squash, beans) but also some of what delight us (decorative gourds, miniature pumpkins). We put food up and trade and barter and potlach with other local farmers and homesteaders. We do most (not all but most) of our shopping at cooperatives in which we are members.

It is not enough – it is not nearly enough – yet it makes us happy, relates us creatively to our little patch of earth and the women, men and other creatures with whom we temporarily dwell. It builds soil for those who come after us; it minimizes our dependence on corporations and other entities we do not respect. But still.

It makes sense to us to live this way, however imperfectly. It feels coherent. It is a way of perceiving the other and our selves and our shared world in ways that maximize shared healing, wellness, happiness and so forth. It emphasizes cooperation, coordination and communication.

Nouwen wrote that we are human not because we can think but because of our potential to love, which love is a poor reflection of the greater love that created us.

I am speaking about a love between us that transcends all thoughts and feelings precisely because it is rooted in God’s first love, a love that precedes all human loves . . . when we trust that the God of love has already given the peace we are searching for, we will see this peace breaking through the broken soil of our human condition and we will be able to let it grow fast and even heal the economic and political maladies of our time (Seeds of Hope 260, 267).

Nouwen’s God is Spencer-Brown’s Universe and von Glasersfeld’s One-which-makes-itself-two. The distinctions in language are not essential; the experience to which they point does matter, because it can helpfully point us in the direction of an ever-deepening, ever-encompassing, ever-self-seeding love.

We are unto each other like soil and blossoms, like sun and rain, harvest and pantry. May our shared grace and Thanksgiving be bountiful!

I want to talk a little about giving attention as an exercise by which we see through the distinctions we make to that which makes distinction possible or, if you like, the groundless ground from which all distinctions arises or “the Mind which caused all minds to be” (T-28.I.11:3), et cetera.

It is natural to make distinctions; the distinction that we already are is very skilled at making distinctions. It is not necessary to reach the first distinction or the original distinction. It is sufficient just to notice a distinction as it happens.

For example, say that I distinguish a tree. There it is – a maple tree in the side yard. In order to distinguish the maple tree, two things have to happen. The first is the positive distinction of the maple tree. The second is the negative distinction of everything that is not the maple tree.

The two distinctions go together – they arise together, they mutually specify one another – but we tend to notice only the positive one. I don’t see the maple tree and the cosmos. I see the maple tree.

This can become a useful exercise! Simply give attention to something. Observe the maple tree (or coffee mug or sleeping cat or what-have-you). Notice it fully. Then notice it has boundaries, which is how you identify it as a tree (or a cat or a what-have-you).

The boundary is a division: on the inside of the boundary, the frame the boundary makes, it’s all maple tree. On the other side, the outer side, it’s the cosmos. It’s everything but the maple tree, which thus makes the maple tree possible. Can you notice this?

I don’t mean notice Main Street in the background, or the church on the far side of Main Street, or the hill beyond the church, or the sky beyond the hill.

I mean notice the everything-the-maple-tree-is-not.

If you notice the hill, say, then you’ve just shifted objects. The maple tree is gone, dissolved into everything-the-hill-is-not, which in turn specifies the hill.

The question – whether it’s the hill or the maple tree that we are distinguishing – is can we notice the balance? Not as a collection of separate objects but as the generative stillness from which the object under consideration is abstracted?

It is possible to catch a glimpse of the cosmos this way. And even a glimpse of the glimpse can be life-changing.

That’s the first part of the exercise of giving attention.

The second part is also about noticing. It goes like this: we notice that the maple tree and everything-the-maple-tree-is-not fit perfectly together. Together they are the entirety of the distinction. Thus, when they are brought together, the distinction vanishes. There is no maple tree and there is no everything-the maple-tree-is-not.

Thus, in this perfect fit – this natural complementarity – division disappears and what remains is unity, oneness, et cetera.

Does this make sense? Can you see it that way? In the actual process of giving attention can you see the maple tree and everything-the-maple-tree-is-not which is to say, see unity, oneness, et cetera?

Perhaps it is like folding a sheet of paper and cutting a heart out. Remember how we did that as children? And perhaps later with our sons and daughters, nieces and nephews? The heart is distinguished – it is a distinction made with scissors in the paper. Yet it fits perfectly into the heart-shaped hole that remains. If you put the two together, there is no longer a distinction. There is the whole from which the distinction arose.

We call that whole “unity,” which is sensible.

However, to distinguish it as a unity, as I do here, means that there is now “unity” and “everything-the-unity-is-not.” The same logic as before applies. We bring the two together and get one. And by getting “one” we get “all-that-is-not-one.”

In our living, it seems we cannot go beyond this ongoing distinguishing, which appears as infinity because it never ends. The distinctions keep going; it is turtles (or distinctions) all the way down.

Some folks call this a vicious circle, because it is effectively a trap. It is like the sentence “I am a liar.” If it’s true, it’s false. But if it’s false, then it’s true. There is no escape.

It can feel that way when we go deeply into the distinctions and the process of distinguishing. It is a loop.

Yet note that the realization of the loop, the circularity, co-exists without conflict alongside the various distinctions we make. That is, we realize this infinity that appears like a trap but oddly enough we can still bake bread, muck the pasture, discuss Husserl, make love.

The circularity isn’t vicious; it’s fructive. It’s a functional circle. It’s creative.

So I want to suggest thinking about this less as a circle reenacting itself over and over on a plane, and more a spiral endlessly widening and narrowing and undulating. Each loop absorbs all previous loops, so it’s a new loop, but in the sense of extension. It is creative rather than merely repetitive.

Here is how mathematician Louis Kauffman puts it.

Everything is determined by the delineation of nothing. Comprehension and incomprehension share a common boundary. Any duality is identical to its fitting together into union (Constructivist Foundations Vol. 13, No. 1, p. 33).

Our living, as such, is both infinite and finite, and this is not a problem unless we start trying to use one of the poles to obviate the other.

In this way, we are neither one (unity) nor two (multiplicity). We need a new logic, or a new sense of our living.

It is in this sense that I suggest that A Course in Miracles does not go far enough. It remains firmly in the “one with God” camp, which is useful – profoundly useful in my experience – but not dispositive.

It is in this sense that I was called to explore other approaches to understanding this living experience that is so rich and vivid and joyful but also sometimes confusing and painful and even mysterious.

I do not suggest anybody else has to wander – or wonder – as I do, though I am certainly grateful for the company.

Once we realize that we are an observer within a system, the limits of which exceed our capacity for observation, but which do not disallow our ongoing observation and exploration and play, then a lot of our living simplifies. Free of the need to be “right” in an absolute sense, we are empowered to be creative, which is a synonym for loving.

As I have outlined above, to “be creative” is simply to give attention to the circularity naturally comprising our self, other selves, and the countless worlds our mutuality bring forth.

Donald Hoffman’s work exploring the world as a perceptual interface related to fitness rather than veridicality suggests that we take our living seriously but not literally. The world we bring forth – that we experience – is our reality but is not the reality.

A lot of stress and anxiety and discord dissolves once we see and accept this.

Yet I do not assert that this insight is the end of our shared work (or play, perhaps). It needs to be understood, applied, integrated and expanded. There is always more to learn and we can always be more skillful in our loving with others. In this sense, the work and play as such exceed us. But that, too, is a comfort.