Segall

"Twilight is intimate,” writes Erwin Strauss,

“because here nature veils the boundaries separating things from one another as well as the distances that divide us from them” (PP, p. 19).

In sleep, the body is lived once more as an undivided whole, temporarily escaping the tumult of incarnate life''.

MS

"My holzwege has not been straight or exhaustive; much has been left unexplored, and perhaps some of the discursive trails I’ve traced end only in thickets. I end only where I began, with the awareness that the only home I’ll ever know is already here. But a home without the company of others lacks warmth and good conversation. I’d rather continue my eternal wanderings through this wonderfully weird world in search of those friends whose heart burns with the same flame that lights my path''.

MS

"What am I? I am not a thing, physical or mental, but an

“action of resonating concern…embodied [as a] locus of experience…installed in a world with respect to which I…can engage in various ‘world’-related endeavors” (MoM, p. 195).

In body, speech, and mind, I engage the world because I care. I care because I know the eternal presence of Being can be so easily misread and ignorantly experienced as a dualistic realm of subjects over and against objects. I cannot be separated from my body, my voice, or my mind—nor from the phenomenal world these open me toward. I am aware of but not contained by any of these.

It seems I am not a what—I am a who. As a who, as opposed to a what, I cannot be chained to any particular substance, quality, or idea. As is written in the Tibetan tantric text gSang-ba snying-po:

“…there is [nothing] that could be called a fetter;

Nor is there anyone to be fettered!

Fettering is done by the divisic notion which holds to a self

Tying and untying knots in the open sky” (MoM, p. 31).

A who is not an immutable essence, but a mandalic concentration of energy representable as a cross-cap (2-D), sphere, (3-D), or toroidal vortex (4-D) that forms an extensionless point of origin attended by an appreciative surrounding audience.

“In this manifestation of the point,” says Guenther,

“a departure from its source is indicated, and this departure expresses itself in the experienced (relished) relationship of the central (‘original’) point and the peripheral (‘moving’) point becoming an arc which, as it closes on itself, becomes the circle of (‘encircling’) attendants. Thus, it appears as an enlivening geometrical configuration imbued with the experience of beauty” (MoM, p. 43).

I am a site of mutual concern where self and other arise together as conspirators in the intrinsically ordered and marvelously coherent unfolding of the universe. I am Dasein, the cosmos as it happens “here” (Goodman, 11/30/09). But here is also “there”: I cannot be without you. In the dependent co-arising of our being-with one another, we participate in the further development of “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Corpus Hermeticum). As a who, I am the experiential event horizon created by the folding of the garment of Being back upon itself. Each who emerges as a center attended by a surrounding audience of others with their own unique perspectives (“…center is everywhere…”). This twisting of the universe into multiple centers of perspective prevents any final closure on the identity of a particular being. I remain always open to reinterpretation or even reinvention depending on the company I find myself sharing. The universal contains all particulars (there is no outside to a universe whose “circumference is nowhere”—all things share in unbounded oneness), even while each particular achieves a unique once-occurrent emergence onto the world stage''.

MS