Chris at Tuesday Evening Conversation brought up revealed truth.
Perhaps, that which can’t be reached by ordinary thought or logical inference.
What is it?
Try this . . .
If Reality is a unified extension of Being, (or vice versa) and if what is whole is the background Source of What Is, do things emerge out into appearance as surprising isomorphic realizations of already inter-existing relational phenomena whose form and formlessness blink on-and-off, in-and-out, throughout time and space, dimensions and imagination revealing Itself by means of Attention and/or Ritual Faith?
Theologians have their word, transubstantiation. One thing becomes another thing even as appearance seems to indicate it is what it was, and (let’s call it) faith seems to hold that it is now what it really is.
“Hocus Pocus” is a diminutive phrase coming from “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” the words traditionally used at the consecration in Catholic liturgy. One level of reasoning, however incomprehensible, is that bread is no longer bread, wine no longer wine, but, now, body and blood of Jesus the Christ. This contention, patently absurd on its surface, haunts the imagination of nonduality and non-separative wholeness of being.
Perhaps, in effect, the reality of transubstantiation is not really about change, but rather, about pointing to the very nature/fact of what something is.
We acknowledge ordinary temporal and spatial change. Winter becomes spring. Bare trees flower. Youthful bodies become aged bodies.
But what of non-temporal and non-spatial metamorphosis? “Form is emptiness, emptiness form.” The Heart Sutra also claims there is “no old age and death and also no extinction of them.”
Night becomes day, day becomes night. Things change, we say.
Woodpecker dismantles tree trunk. Dozens of cars occupy the same space only seconds apart. The 18 year old who rebounded and jump shot is now the 80 year old watching the Warriors end their season with bad shooting losing to the Kings with Klay Thompson 0 for 10 and scoreless in defeat.
But let's re-translate plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, an epigram by Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr in the January 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes (“The Wasps”).(wiktionary) -- usually translated "the more things change, the more they stay the same"
Let's put forward this translation: "The more a thing changes, the more it becomes itself."
Hundreds of thoughts and emotions occupy the same physical emotional intellectual space only milliseconds appending in tandem.
Cats are hungry and watchful at same time. Dog stares and pees at same time. What we call (in ignorant appellation) human and divine, matter and form, one and many, this and that, mine and yours — are separative words for one reality done distinct and believed to be different.
Which brings me back to transubstantiation. Our personal preference hubris makes of one two. (See e.e. cumming’s poem.) Still, I am confounded as to how singularity, morphic resonance, and quantum entanglement figure with the notion that each thing is each thing — and yet each thing is part of and belongs to Itself-as-Itself, one thing as another, another as one thing.
Separation is a great excuse for war, injustice, crime, and punishment.
Metaphors abound. Is “the body of Christ” a metaphor for what is whole, entire, without beginning or end, eternal (no time), infinite (without boundary) and non-imaginal (without an image)?
Our imagination creates worlds. God’s, we say, created this world. (Explain that to someone sitting in a cafe with a New York Times.)
Let Wallace Stevens have his stanza:
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
(From poem, Sunday Morning, by Wallace Stevens)
The mystic looks without discrimination.
Mystics see what is there to be seen.
Is that awkward word "transubstantiation" a finger pointing to what is, being, revealed?
