I am gifted. Today, another gift.

That statement—‘I am gifted’—seems to make some claim about I.

The fact of it is, though, that ‘I am gifted’ means that I am receiving gifts!

Today, 16 April 2018, the gift was a revelation of the nature of perception.

I have seen conceptually (via one of those gifts — but intellectualised) and for what seems to be a long time now, that the perceptions we have can be likened (inter alia) to images projected on a movie screen.

I have also for much time been aware of the ‘black and white’ (not really, but that will have to do) ‘grainy’ background that is there when the eyes are closed. More recently, I have become aware that the grainy screen is still there when the eyes are open.

Today I see by direct perception that the grainy background IS the ‘movie screen’. In difference to a movie theatre, the movie screen is not at a distance. I am ‘right up against it’, for want of a better image. The reality that I experience, the differentiated projection of the universal real into what appears as my senses, is at no distance from me at all. My nose is stuck right into it, again for want of a better description.

This means there is no space in there at all for a personal interpretation of this. It also means that the whole of my experience of reality, the bits I like and the bits I don’t, all is from the same immediate source and that source is ‘behind’ me (it’s not, or rather ‘behind’ is not the right direction, but the words to describe this direction do not exist, to my knowledge).

My perceptual position, my locus, is right at the edge of reality looking out into an (imperfectly?) reflective screen. The whole stream of sensation is coming up against that screen where it is reflected. ‘Distance’ is perceptual not real.

Everything in my perceived life, all the stuff I had used to ‘dislike’ or ‘despise’, and the lover who I so love at my apparent side, is coming from the same place, ‘behind’ me, in the root of reality.

What a gift.

I know absolutely nothing now.

Except – how do ‘I turn around’? Look to the ‘source’?

I saw earlier (some days ago) that the fact of my existence is due to the descent of a ‘focus of manifestation’ from what I suppose I would have to call ’source’ or ‘unlimited being’ which lies ‘behind’ me and is what gives me apparent form and substance, realises me. Presumably, when that focus is withdrawn the life ‘here’ ends…

“Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body.”

Virginia Woolf: The Death of the Moth

This is as if my ‘face’, the projected front of me, has behind it an infinite thread springing from the ultimate source.

Some artists have represented this. How can they not? If the perceptions I am gifted are real and true they must be universal in the unconscious and be regularly caught up unconsciously by the species, as I find to be the case here and there in all art.

Is that the value of art, to represent unconscious aspects of reality that are otherwise unrealised? Perhaps.

The art of realisation is to make the unconscious conscious.