=kit056.txt

KIT 56 - Mirror Images

[ N.B. (sa) -- These denominated names is those of the thinker
that thought the preceeding thought.  (They were not in quotes, so
so I note.)]


"Not being is the mirror, the world is the reflection and your eye
is as the reflection of the eye of the seer."
MAHMOOD SHABISTARI

"By contemplating Him, we contemplate ourselves and by
contemplating us He contemplates Himself."
IBN 'ARABI

"The same physical phenomenon may be computed in two complementary
space-time frameworks."
EINSTEIN

[ Note (sa) -- I don't know if that preceeding is quote or only a
paraphrase.  The term 'complementary' is interesting. ]


Typifying the characteristic outlook of the Sufis, the great Sufi
mystic and metaphysician Ibn Arabi invariably presents the same
reality as seen from two complementary points of view.

"I see him through his eyes, he sees me through my eyes."
IBN 'ARABI

We humans are continually striving to discover ourself in another
ourself. But to discover ourself in another ourself, we cannot
suffice with contemplating the other as the object cognized, nor
can the other know us. To discover the features of the identity we
are looking for, we need to place ourselves in the vantage point
of the 'other'. One can espy in him/her as the mirror-image of
oneself (representing that which we have in common with the 'other
ourselves'). Therein are one's own qualities and defects and
aspirations and anxieties, concerns, resentment, motivations, and
passion and compassion.

Reciprocally, one can discover those very same features of oneself
in the other's mirror image of him/herself that we are for
him/her. This is illustrated by two mirrors reflecting one another
in infinite regress as in the typical Sufi architectural model of
the place of mirrors, Aina Khanah, adopted by the Mogul emperors.
The light of a single candle would be duplicated in a plethora of
scintillating lights. The face of a person would be duplicated
into an endless glut of faces in an inane degree. Now for the sake
of hypothesis, suppose that face were that of God and supposing
the mirrors fail to project a genuine replication of the Divine
Face, that would be an apt metaphor to describe the world of
humans. Still, as in the Qur'an: "All faces are His Face."

Yet admittedly a mirror may well - whether designedly or by its
defectiveness - amplify defects or blow up qualities or distort
the features of one's personality. For example we may discover a
fault that seemed negligible in ourselves in the more blatant
fault of the other. We also may discover their faults because we
have them in ourselves. Conversely, since every quality has its
shadow defect, we might discover a quality in ourselves by
observing the shadow of that defect in the other. For example we
may discover our inherent joy while disapproving facetiousness in
the other.

This way of considering experience is called the permutation of
vantage points in a one-to-one relationship. Essentially this
example is simple enough when the reciprocity of the terms is on a
parity basis. But consider the relationship between the totality
and the constituents of the totality, such that each fraction
carries potentially within itself the attributes of the totality.

Examples are provided by the difference between a fraction of a
hologram and the total hologram, or the relationship between the
DNA of a cell where certain genes are turned on and others
recessive and the DNA of the Blastema (the cell at the outset
where the DNA is in the undifferentiated state). Now this
relationship could not be expressed in the mathematical formula
T=p+p+p etc., but rather T=px , which represents the basic
mathematical formula of the holistic model of the universe'.

[ Note (sa) .  I do not know what the 2nd formula, or schematic
formula, is.  It's T=pxR .   The 'R' charactaer displays as a
Yen_sign in Kaivan, and as a canpital N with a MANANA sign on its
head in my text_only Save. ]

"Those to whom unity is revealed see the Absolute whole in the
parts; yet each is in despair at its particularization from the
whole . . . Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The
world is a man, and man is a world . . . all mingled together:
angels with demons, Satan with the archangel, all mingled like
unto seed and fruit together are gathered in the point of the
present. The heart of the barley seed equals a hundred harvests!"
MAHMOOD SHABISTARI

So much for the assumption that the holistic paradigm is a find of
this century!

Furthermore, the Sufis recognize a mirror image of a very
different nature - if we may call it so. Certainly they (we)
consider the corporeal world as a reflection by way of forms -
endowed therefore with spacial parameters - of a reality that is
formless yet is endowed with what one might call a metaphysical
orderliness.                

[ Note (sa): The following 3 quotes are apparaently all from
Werner Heisenberg, he should eat stale sauerkraut in a smokey
Ratskeller with the rest of the rats for all eternity. ]

"Can you or anyone else reach the central order of things or
events whose existence seems beyond doubt as directly as you can
reach the soul of another human being? . . . yes the word soul
refers to the central order to the inner core of being whose outer
manifestations may be highly diverse and pass our understanding .
law."       
(Heisenberg)

"But the decision upon goals cannot be made within science and
technology; it is made if we are not to go wholly astray, at a
point where our vision is directed upon the whole man . . . And in
the spiritual patterns known to us, the relation to a meaningful
connection of the whole, beyond what can be immediately seen and
experienced, has always played the deciding role."
(Heisenberg)

"It is only within this spiritual pattern, of the ethos prevailing
in the community that man acquires the points of view whereby he
can also shape his own conduct wherever it involves more than a
mere reaction to external situations . . . These ideals do not
spring from inspection of the immediately visible world, but from
the regions of the structures lying behind it."

Werner Heisenberg
(Nobel Prize in physics, inventor of the matrix quantum mechanics
theory)

"The soul is awe-stricken and shudders at the sight of the
beautiful, for it feels that something is evoked in it that was
not imparted to it from without by the senses, but has always been
already laid down there in a deeply unconscious region."
PLATO [ Symposium, maybe]

"The reason why our sentient, percipient, and thinking ego is met
nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be
indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world
picture."
ERWIN SCHROEDINGER
(Nobel Prize in physics, inventor of the wave equation in quantum
mechanics)

[ Footnote kit056__1]

This way of looking at things highlights implicitly the antinomy
between an archetype and an exemplar - a totally different mode of
mirror reflection. Such a relationship could possibly be described
in a transcendental equation, i.e. T=px. 

In this borderline case, the polarity is infinitely offset. And
this is where mysticism comes in: the contemplative grasps and
embodies the harmonic order beyond the existential universe of
which the existential universe is conventionally considered to be
a mere projection. Though meaningfully structured, this archetypal
order is a reality beyond form. The Sufi mystics strive to tune
their consciousness to a level in the celestial spheres called
'jabarut' where reality is grasped as pure splendor beyond form.

Plotinus called it: "the translucence of the eternal splendor of
the One through material phenomena." (Plotinus was a Greek mystic
philosopher of the Neo-Platonic school that inspired Sufism in
Iran)

Yet these 'gestalts', these pictorial patterns shining forth upon
the mirror of the psyche from the deep recesses of the soul,
albeit mere inadequate and distorted projections of a posited
perfect divine orderliness, possibly bewildering optic illusions
spirited on the rainbow bridge between the celestial realms and
the hackneyed palace of mirrors, nevertheless fulfil the purpose
of existence because they intimate the divine intention. While our
interpretation of the feedback of experience proves disappointing
by its limitation, in the patterning of images within the psyche.

Let us beware of considering the physical universe as a mere
projection of the 'real reality' behind it all! If indeed we are
speaking of mirror images; we are talking about reciprocity.
However rather than reality mirrored in a mirror, we are talking
about the two terms of an antinomy.

This is the implicate versus the explicate order of Dr. David
Bohm. Or one might say it is the timeless spaceless versus the
transient, local - a bi-polar reality, however offset the
relationship between these two poles might be. Instead of thinking
of God and man, let us think of it as two poles of the One being.

"God is human perfection and man is divine limitation"
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

If you just see the impact of the eternal on the transient, you
neglect the feedback of the transient into the eternal. It is
actually a two way system: the feed-forward and the feed-back. 
Rupert Sheldrake emphasizes the feedback from the existential
level of reality to what he calls the morphogenetic field. Dr.
David Bohm elicits both: the feed-forward and the feed-back.
Moreover he highlights the two way exchange from what he calls
'the information field' to the existential and vice versa.

Seen thus, it is in the physical patterns of the universe and in
the human heritage of works of beauty, of culture and human
enterprise - in which we exult - that the creative act of the
universe is actuated. The elegance of the universal software is
perceived as the beauty evidenced by "the proper conformity of the
parts to one another and the whole", a phrase of Aristotle.

For the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi, "God is both the created Creator and the
creating creature", not a Being removed from the universe. Yet the
terms of the antinomy are incommensurate. Note that transcendence
is still respected since it includes that which it transcends. 

"The place of concepts is taken by images content that are not
thought but are seen pictorially."
C. J. JUNG

"As ordering operators, and formatives, in this world of symbolic
images, the archetypes function indeed as the desired bridge
between sense perception and Ideas . . ."
WERNER HEISENBERG

Ultimately, these images, evanescent as they might be are equally
part of our being, as well as the archetypes of which they are the
projections.

What Shabistari is conveying, is more still: we are not only in
our form an albeit inadequate effigy of the divine archetype, as
is said in the Old Testament. Our personal vantage point, rather
than being the convergence of the total vantage point having
incurred considerable constraint by the funneling down, is but the
reflection of the Divine Eye in that mirror which is paradoxically
mere void, in which the universe appears as a reflection.

"Was it utterly absurd to seek behind the ordering structures of
this world a consciousness whose intentions were these very
structures?"
WERNER HEISENBERG

[ Footnote kit56__2 ]

By espying in the footprints in this bountiful universe of the
divine blue-prints, symptoms of orderliness, or peering into the
scenario in Alice's mirror, or scanning the patterns of the
shadows on the wall of the cave (the electronic vapor chamber for
the physicist), and extrapolating between these, we are actually
discovering our own minds and through our minds the mind of the
universe.

Now if we adopt the Sufi point of view, jockeying with the
permutation of terms: what is happening is that it is ultimately
the mind of the universe that is discovering itself. It is doing
so through and as our minds by dint of the projection of this mind
in what we call physical reality. The consequence for the Sufi is
that instead of thinking of ourselves as the observer or even the
instrument of the observer or, the convergence of the glance of
the observer, we need to think of our consciousness passively with
respect to the divine action.

"In the state of union there can be no mediation between God and
man; and consequently the dialogue with God is evacuated. When God
intimates His intentions, our act of listening stands in the way."
ABD EL JABBAR NIFFARI      

================================================================

COMMENTS FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY:

TEXT QUOTE:
"The reason why our sentient, percipient, and thinking ego is met
nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be
indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world
picture."
ERWIN SCHROEDINGER
(Nobel Prize in physics, inventor of the wave equation in quantum
mechanics)

[ Footnote kit056__1]

'world picture' would be 'WeltanSchauung'
I dunno what this means, if anything, ut if you meet this Mr.
Schroedinger in Central Park -- out looking for his cat, no doubt
-- I wouln't play the shell game against him. 
Sounds like just a dash of Kant, and cant at that.
I mean it sounds frightfully cute until you ask -- just why does
Russel say there's a Theory of Types -- why can't a logical object
be its own designatum -- ain't you never heard of
self_observation.  I mean, this sentence was typed.  Big deal.
           
----------------------

TEXT QUOTE:
"Was it utterly absurd to seek behind the ordering structures of
this world a consciousness whose intentions were these very
structures?"
WERNER HEISENBERG

[ Footnote kit56__2 ]

And what the heck does that mean, if anything, once you take out
the anthropomorphism.

I mean, it's a perfectly adequate explanation of how Athena built
the Parthenon but had to let Periclese bill for it because they
don't take MasterCharge on Mt. Olympus.  But I don't know how much
farther back you can take it.

Nowadays in the USA, Darwin is Good and 'Intelligent Design' is
bad.  The International Herald Tribune says so, every chance it
gets and some it doesn't.  But if either side has the foggiest
idea what 'intelligent design' means, they ain't like elucidate it
yet.                  

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