It is the simple shining forth of essence, a necessarily overflowing primal water of spiritual depth that in its ineffability always exceeds the grasp of the mental-rational desire for closure, and category. Confounding, as Bergson states: “it is of the essence of reasoning to shut us up in the circle of the given” and “Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them” (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 202). If the spiritual is the diaphainon, and the transparency is diaphaneity, then the quality of the spiritual is its diaphaneity (EPO, 361): not only light illuminating darkness, nor day’s dawning cleaving the night, but: Darkness visible via a light within, or like the classical Chinese term for the ineffable, or mysterious: Xuan is described in the first dictionary, the Shuo Wen Jie Zi: Black, but with the color of cinnabar, this is mystery. “for now I see as through a glass darkly but then I shall see face to face” – time freedom is the visage of awareness, turned to the enveloping wholeness of the incipient face of life-affirming judgment- the etheric body of the conscience as a state of sensory knowledge. Tomberg, in Meditations on the Tarot says: “in the passing beyond the intellect it is a matter of choosing between the decision to replace the intellect once and for all with the breath from above and the decision to place the intellect in the active service of this breath” (MotT, 604). In the moment that transparency illuminates itself as a transcending quality of space, that brightens the hitherto dark unknowable depth of slipping beyond contact with the mental-rational, it is the quality of its light and clarity that enlivens the coniunctio oppositorum of “discursive intellectuality and illuminative spirituality; or in other words, it is the alchemical work of the union of human wisdom, which is folly in the eyes of God, with divine wisdom which is folly in the eyes of man, in such a way that the result …is a single wisdom which understands both that which is above and that which is below. “
Direction emerges- ascent and descent- and where light is an emanation, the concretion of time emerging as direction gathers as a generation of being- and the integral cognition of generation is simultaneously present: ascent takes the form of rising up towards heaven and descent moving towards earth, as immediate waves of resonant vibration- prayer rising and revelation descending, “complete a circle which contracts and concentrates to become a point where the ascent and descent are simultaneous and coincide” (MotT, 607). Providing direction to the directionless, yet allowing the directionless to exist within all directions perceived as vascularizing intensities of simultaneous and luminous presence: “if we perceive history in this way, it becomes integral” (EPO, 192). That is to say: I invite history to include both direction and the directionless, divested of temporality and its sequential nature. On this I make the whole of duration an altar, and on it will resurrect the mutations of the ever-present origin as an offering: “a-mension is the presence of Origin” (EPO, 179)- upon which the light shining from a pewter chalice becomes a cobbler’s emergence into the spontaneous, spherical poiesis of the cosmos, sophio-poeisis, or Poeisophia: demanding a sophiology.