For a thing to be something, it must survive nothingness;
otherwise, it is merely posing as something.
This is an insight to hold as a torch in hand as we wade through the void of perception.
Let us follow, gradually, what it illuminates; what it reveals.
Physical reality is often experienced as tactile;
all things are measured in terms of weight.
Weight, what is it?
Everything, the visible and non-visible, has weight, except light.
It is empirically factual that light has no weight; it has no mass and therefore no gravity.
In the same vein, nothing in physical reality travels faster than the speed of light because if all has weight, then obviously all measurable things move more slowly relative to light, which is weightless.
Thus, weight comes into being when light is measured as movement.
Movement is measurement. Where there is no measurement, there is immovability.
Before science arrived at geometry, out of which values of measurement were further articulated, humans have always measured.
The eye is a powerful organ of measurement, and so are the other senses.
The brain, however, is the ultimate synthesizer, the object-before-object.
The brain is the object-before-object because what we experience as things is a synthesis of disparate movements as measure. This is also why the brain is constantly seeking order. If there is disorder to the specific architecture of a being, to the brain it registers as pain. Although it might seem that the pain is a direct result of circumstances, phenomenologically, it is simply a signal that the brain is sensitive to its registration of disorder, or that the brain has synthesized disorder into a status quo. This tendency to synthesize into a status quo is the brain’s most structural power as object-before-object. It is what gives measure around a definite point structural integrity.
The entire human experience, since the inception of humanity, is hinged on this.
Let us make a necessary delineation: Order is not the same as status quo. Status quo is simply what has gained structural integrity around a definite point. It may be structurally coherent and still be distorted. It may be as solid and durable as a slab of rock tens of thousands of years old, and still be distorted. That is the nature of status quo.
Solidity is not necessarily order, yet there can be no solidity without order.
The brain operates on this level as object-before-object.
How is this paradox possible? One may ask.
The principle of movement, measure, and order out of which the brain evolved cannot be distorted. It can only be instrumentalised. This is why, for a thing to be something, it must survive nothingness: that point where it returns to the immovable, weightless, motiveless nature of light, where it does not require or rely on any form of justification for its being. Otherwise, it is merely a description posing as the thing — an instrumentalisation of the principle of order.
In other words, can the thing stand without justification under the weightlessness of light?
If it needs constant justification of its thingness, it is merely accumulating weight through description. It becomes that which props up the illusion of separation and strives endlessly to maintain the appearance of separateness.
Distortion always requires justification, effort, and excesses for its maintenance.
The Weight of Reality as Object of Relation
The colours we perceive as the tapestry and visual texture of our physical reality are a measure of the movement of light separated into wavelengths.
So although light has no mass or gravity,
weight comes into being the moment it is measured as colour with a wavelength range.
From here, objective reality is formed,
and weight takes all sorts of forms:
psychological, perceptual, sensorial, emotional, moral, and invariably physical.
We often latch on to the physical as the most tangible form of weight, so life and relationships are about piling on the weight incrementally, cumulatively.
This is often considered positive action.
Both the so-called good and bad guys are constantly preoccupied with positive action where it means accumulating mass and gravity. The very form of what is accumulated is merely the object of desire regardless of its moral measure. And where there is accumulation around a definite reference point or identification, there is bound to be an increase in mass and heaviness. That which is heavy through habitual accumulation, regardless of its moral attributes, will sooner or later become self-referential in order to constantly maintain its structural integrity.
This is how objects and their mechanizations come into being.
An object stands relative to another object. The object is never merely itself. It is always an object-of-relation.
A cup is not only a cup. It is a cup in relation to a table, hand, content, thirst, value, desire, use, attention, memory, language. The object’s “thingness” is relational.
Thus we return again to the Igbo saying, “where one thing stands, something else stands beside it.” This is a law of relation and of proportion.
It is not a fact that the cup is more important than the table it rests on, nor is the content of the cup more valuable than the cup that holds it. Any importance given to one over the other only arises from the “positive action” of weight accumulation and making a preferred or non-preferred reference point into a store of value.
The word “opposite” and how it registers psychologically is the direct consequence of a carefree attribution of comparative value between people and things in everyday relationships.
Opposite is often Relation void of sensitivity to the movement by which a thing comes into being as a measure. It is a hastening of comparison into distance, then distance into separation, then separation into conflict.
But two things standing apart have not left Relation. They have only revealed contour and context.
The mundane use of words such as “more”, “less”, and other superlatives makes one oblivious to the violence and insensitivity of oversimplification. It is also why, rather than honouring difference, society craves conformity.
Conformity is the attempt to reduce the discomfort of Relation by collapsing difference into sameness, or worse, by justifying difference as a dichotomy of contending things for which one should “pick sides”.
Humankind has always been aware of the interconnectedness of all things. Yet the tendency has always been to endlessly seek proof of this “oneness” by the incessant measure and pitting of one thing against the other, as if the ultimate goal were that wholesomeness (oneness) would be the sole property of one at the detriment of the other. This alone brings into being a paradox that we may then call karma simply because it replays, in a loop, like a broken record.
The question then is, “Does oneness need proof?” Where one thing stands, something else stands beside it , is both fact and evidence of oneness, is it not?
It seems that each and every one is, consciously or unconsciously, oriented toward this oneness, like following a North Star that points back to the immeasurable, the weightless light.
What else is there to do?
Yet there is a deeply ingrained need, perhaps developed over millennia (as a karmic loop), to possess what is immeasurable.
See then the childish paradox: to possess what is immeasurable is simply to manufacture an object of desire. And if the object is not the immeasurable, then it is merely posing as it;
the circle continues, like a ring with no entry or exist point.
Leave a Reply