Facets of the Divine Feminine: Babalon and the Queen of Heaven in Binah, from Promethea #21 (”The Wine of Her Fornications”) by Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III (2002).
“For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored and the scorned,
I am the harlot and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the barren one and the one with many children.
I am she whose marriage is multiple, and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not give birth.
I am the comforting of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom.
It is my husband who begot me.
I am the mother of my father and the sister of my husband.
And he is my offspring.
I am the servant of him who prepared me and I am the lord of my offspring.
But he is the one who begot me before time on a day of birth and he is my offspring in time, and my power is from him.
I am the staff of his power in his youth and he is the rod of my old age.
And whatever he wills happens to me.
I am the incomprehensible silence and the much-remembered thought.
I am the voice of many sounds and the utterance (logos) of many forms.
I am the utterance of my name
Why, you who hate me, do you love me
And hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
And you who confess me, deny me.
You who speak the truth about me, tell lies about me,
And you who have told lies about me, speak the truth about me.
You who know me, become ignorant of me; and may those who have been ignorant of me come to know me
For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am unashamed, I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace
Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.
Do not be haughty to me when I am discarded upon the earth
And you will find me among those that are to come.
And do not look upon me on the garbage-heap and go and leave me discarded.
And you will find me in the kingdoms.
…
I am she who exists in all fears and boldness in trembling.
I am she who is weak, and I am well in pleasure of place.
I am foolish and I am wise
I am she who has been hated everywhere and who has been loved everywhere.
I am she who is called Life and you have called Death.
I am she who is called Law and you have called Lawlessness.
I am the one you have pursued, and I am the one you have restrained.
I am the one you have scattered and you have gathered me together.
Before me you have been ashamed and you have been unashamed with me.
I am the gnosis of my seeking, and the finding of those who seek after me.
And the command of those who ask of me.
And the power of the powers by my gnosis
of the angels who have been sent by my logos,
And the gods in their seasons by my command,
And it is with me that the spirits of all humans exist,
and it is within me that women exist.
I am she who is honored and praised and who is despised scornfully.
I am peace and because of me war has come to be.
And I am an alien and a citizen.
I am substance and she who has no substance.
Those who come into being from my synousia are ignorant of me,
And those who are in my substance know me.
Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me
And those who are far from me have known me.
For what is inside of you is what is outside of you.
And the one who molded you on the outside has made an impression of it inside of you.
And that which you see outside of you,
you see inside of you.
It is manifest and it is your garment.
For I am the one who alone exists,
And I have no one who will judge me.
For many are the sweet forms that exist in numerous sins
And unrestrained acts and disgraceful passions, and temporal pleasures,
Which are restrained until they become sober
And run up to their place of rest.
And they will find me there,
And they will live and they will not die again.”
- Excerpts from the Gnostic text “The Thunder, Perfect Mind” (c. 200 CE).
For more on occult & esoteric art, please see “Noise vs. Signal”.
"Art can change what the world allows us to notice.
A landscape, a face, or a sound may already be there, but this does not mean that every aspect of it is equally available to attention. Perception is selective. Habit, language, memory and expectation help determine what stands out and what recedes into the background.
Art can disturb this organisation.
A painting may make a quality of light newly visible. Music may reveal structures of tension and release that ordinary attention overlooks. A poem can return depth to a word or object that familiarity has made almost transparent.
Nothing supernatural is required. Reality has not necessarily changed. What has changed is the way it is disclosed.
This suggests that the experienced world is not a perfectly fixed presentation of things. It is articulated through attention, salience, concepts, embodiment and history. Culture can therefore enlarge the repertoire through which Reality becomes available to us.
Art is one of the ways this happens.
It can interrupt familiar categories and allow something previously unnoticed to become significant. After encountering a work, we may return to an ordinary street, tree, face or sound and find that it appears differently. The difference can be genuine even when the underlying thing has not changed.
This also helps explain why art can sometimes feel connected with truth without making truth claims in the ordinary sense.
Beauty does not guarantee truth. A beautiful image can deceive. But beauty can intensify disclosure. It can hold attention long enough for complexity, relation or strangeness to emerge before habit closes over them again.
A thing is rarely exhausted by the category under which we first encounter it. A tree can be organism, habitat, material, memory, pattern, symbol and part of a larger ecological field. Each disclosure may be valid without containing the whole.
Art reminds us of this excess.
It resists the tendency to treat one useful description as the final nature of a thing.
In this sense, art does not need to create Reality.
It can create a new way in which Reality becomes visible."
From "Liber Arenae" (Vol. IX, No. 37).
Image: "Wheatfield with Crows" by Vincent van Gogh (1890).
You sit quietly at its centre, while doors around you, above you and below you continually open. Each door is a possible path of attention: a memory, a sensation, a fear, a desire, an idea, a plan.
Sometimes a door captures you. Attention is drawn through it and begins travelling along its neural and conceptual pathways. A memory unfolds into other memories. A worry generates possible futures. An idea gathers associations. For a while, the world disclosed through that doorway can seem like the whole world.
Then something changes. You notice what has happened.
This recognition is metacognition: awareness of the activity of your own mind. Attention ceases to be completely identified with its current contents. You can follow the path further, choose another, or return to the centre.
The centre is not a state without thought. Nor is the aim to remain there permanently. Thinking, remembering, imagining and feeling require entering the doors. Life happens through them.
The difference lies in whether attention is captured without recognition, or whether some awareness of the larger room remains.
Returning to the centre widens the aperture. What occupied the whole field becomes one possibility within it. The thought is still there. The emotion is still there. The memory is still there. But other doors have become visible again.
Freedom of attention may begin here: not by closing the doors, but by learning that we do not have to disappear through every one that opens.”
"Calculus offers a useful metaphor for understanding awareness and experience. It distinguishes between the local and the whole, between what is happening in the present and what has accumulated over time. Although these are mathematical ideas, they illuminate a more general pattern that appears in our own experience.
The derivative describes the rate at which something changes at a particular moment. In experience, this resembles the immediate movement of disclosure. Attention detects what is becoming more or less salient, where thought is forming, where emotion is intensifying or fading, and where the world is revealing itself in a new way. The present is not merely a point in time. It is the place where change becomes apparent.
The integral moves in the opposite direction. Rather than examining a single moment, it gathers many moments into a coherent whole. Memory, character, understanding and culture are not created all at once. They emerge through countless acts of perception, judgement and action. What appears stable is often the accumulation of innumerable small changes.
The self may therefore be understood less as a fixed object than as an ongoing integration of experience. No single moment contains the whole person, yet each moment contributes to what the person gradually becomes. Identity is not discovered in an isolated instant but unfolds through the continuous accumulation of disclosure.
These two perspectives belong together. Every present contributes to the whole, and the whole shapes the meaning of every present. Careful attention first reveals the subtle movements occurring here and now. With time, these local observations disclose larger patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
The discipline of awareness therefore moves in two directions at once. It becomes increasingly sensitive to the smallest movements of experience while gradually recognising the larger order that those movements together reveal. Understanding requires both. It requires seeing the moment clearly and allowing many moments to disclose a pattern that none could display alone."
“Our bodies are given life from the midst of nothingness. Existing where there is nothing is the meaning of the phrase, "Form is emptiness."
That all things are provided for by nothingness is the meaning of the phrase, “Emptiness is form." One should not think that these are two separate things.
There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A person’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue.”
Quotations from “Hagakure” (“Hidden Leaves”) (c. 1716).
Masonic Tracing Boards painted by Lady Frieda Harris c. 1938.
“In the First Degree board the practitioner should imagine themselves standing in front of the image, and then stepping into it, crossing the black and white tiles, and ascending the ladder.
The rough stone on the bottom right is the practitioner. She or he may be perfected by the qualities represented by the mason’s tools and symbols upon the ascending ladder.
The symbol of the Sun is shown at the bottom of the ladder, and the top of the board is marked East. This indicates that the practitioner should orient themselves towards the rising Sun, the Golden Dawn.
In the Second Degree board we see the Rainbow Bridge, the human spine with the seven coloured chakras or planets.
The top of the Third Degree board is orientated West, towards the setting Sun. The coffins show that the practitioner’s old self must “die” before they can be reborn as their higher self.
In the centre is the entrance to the Temple of King Sol-Om-On.”
Text from the catalogue produced by The Society of Esoteric Endeavour (2026).
“To tincture Awareness with an idea is to allow that idea to pass beyond intellectual agreement and enter the living organisation of experience.
In the alchemical imagination, a tincture was not merely a colour applied to the surface of matter. It was an active principle believed to penetrate a substance and transform its character from within. Philosophically, this provides a useful metaphor for the way an idea can become more than one passing content among others. It can begin to shape attention, interpretation, emotion, and response.
Awareness itself need not be imagined as a substance. Nor must the alchemical process be taken literally. The claim is more modest: ideas can become deeply integrated dispositions, altering what becomes salient and how experience is organised.
The same world continues to appear. The same sounds, thoughts, memories, bodily sensations, desires, and fears remain present. Yet they may be encountered differently because a guiding idea has entered into their relations.
Consider the idea that thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and the sense of self all appear within Awareness.
Initially, this is only a proposition. It may be examined, tested, doubted, or held provisionally. But when it is repeatedly brought into contact with direct experience, it may begin to dissolve an unnoticed assumption: that there is a fixed observer standing apart from everything that appears.
A thought arises. Ordinarily, it may be experienced as something produced by me, expressing me, or demanding my assent. Under the influence of the guiding idea, the thought may instead be noticed first as an event within experience. The sense of ownership may still arise, but it too can be recognised as part of what appears.
Nothing has been denied. The thought is still present. The practical person still exists. Decisions still have consequences. What has changed is the configuration through which these are encountered.
This resembles the alchemical operation of dissolution.
Dissolution does not necessarily mean destruction. It means loosening a form so that its elements can be perceived and recombined differently. A rigid identification such as “I am this thought” may soften into the more precise recognition that “this thought is present, and identification with it is also present.”
The self is not abolished. Its apparent solidity is opened to examination.
Here the symbolism of Mercury becomes useful. Alchemical Mercury was associated with fluidity, mediation, transformation, and the ability to move between fixed opposites. It could not be contained easily within a single category. It was imagined as both material and volatile, receptive and active, dissolving and binding.
Awareness can be approached through a similar metaphor, provided the comparison is not mistaken for an ontological definition.
Experience is continually changing, yet the capacity for experience seems to remain open to these changes. Awareness receives joy and grief, clarity and confusion, sensation and thought, without becoming permanently identical with any one of them. It is not literally Mercury, but Mercury offers an image for this fluid receptivity.
A guiding idea may introduce something mercurial into a rigid structure of consciousness. It can loosen fixed divisions between observer and observed, thought and thinker, emotion and identity. It allows experience to move where habit had made it static.
Yet dissolution alone is not transformation.
Without discrimination, fluidity may become confusion. Without structure, openness may become passivity. The alchemical work, the Magnum Opus, also involved separation, clarification, conjunction, and fixation. What had been dissolved was not simply abandoned. It had to be examined, distinguished, and integrated into a more coherent form.
The same applies to transformative ideas.
The recognition that the self is constructed does not mean that personal identity is meaningless. The recognition that thoughts appear spontaneously does not eliminate responsibility. The recognition that Awareness exceeds the current focus of attention does not make pain unreal.
A defensible practice must preserve these distinctions. It loosens what has become unnecessarily rigid while retaining the structures required for life, relationship, memory, and ethical action.
The aim is not to dissolve the person into abstraction. It is to make the person less imprisoned by its own constructions.
In this sense, the tincture is tested by its effects. Does the guiding idea increase sensitivity to experience, or reduce everything to doctrine? Does it create greater flexibility, or merely replace one rigidity with another? Does it support clearer action, or encourage withdrawal from the conditions of ordinary life?
An idea that cannot be corrected by experience has ceased to function as an instrument of inquiry. It has become an ideology.
The alchemical vessel provides another useful image. Transformation requires containment. The material must remain within a vessel long enough for its relations to change. Psychologically, sustained attention can perform a comparable function.
An emotion is held without immediate discharge. A thought is observed without being obeyed or suppressed. A contradiction is allowed to remain unresolved long enough for its structure to become visible. Awareness becomes the vessel in which experience can disclose more than the first reaction reveals.
Again, this is metaphor, not proof that Awareness is an independently existing container. Phenomenologically, however, experience can be approached as a field within which different contents coexist, interact, and change.
The guiding idea stabilises the vessel. It reminds attention not to contract immediately around the most urgent appearance.
Over time, the idea may no longer need to be deliberately recalled. It passes from proposition into disposition. A disturbing thought arises and is spontaneously recognised as an event rather than a command. Anxiety narrows attention, but some sense of the wider field remains available. The self reacts, but its first interpretation is no longer assumed to be final.
The tincture has entered the material.
This is where the image of the Philosopher’s Stone becomes relevant. The Stone need not be understood as a supernatural object or the attainment of permanent perfection. It may serve instead as a symbol of integration: the capacity to hold apparent opposites without collapsing into either one.
The person is both constructed and real in its effects. Thoughts are both given and capable of being evaluated. Awareness is both intimately present and difficult to describe without turning it into another object. Experience is both shaped by interpretation and resistant to whatever interpretations we impose upon it.
The Stone symbolises no final escape from these tensions. It represents a more stable way of inhabiting them.
Understood in this manner, the gold sought by the work is not invulnerability, transcendence, or metaphysical certainty. It is a more integrated mode of experience. Thought becomes less tyrannical without becoming useless. Identity becomes more flexible without dissolving into incoherence. Attention becomes more open without losing the capacity to discriminate and act.
The base material is ordinary life itself.
Fear, desire, habit, memory, conflict, embodiment, and limitation are not impurities to be discarded. They are the material through which transformation becomes possible. The work does not begin elsewhere, in some purified realm beyond experience. It begins with whatever is already appearing.
To tincture Awareness is therefore not to cover experience with a preferred spiritual interpretation. It is to introduce a guiding idea carefully, test it against what appears, and permit it to alter the relations through which experience is lived.
The idea dissolves certain rigidities. Attention separates what had been confused. Reflection brings neglected elements into conjunction. Repetition allows the recognition to become stable enough to survive changing conditions.
What emerges is not another substance and not a perfected self. It is a different configuration of the same life: less fixed around immediate identification, more responsive to complexity, and increasingly transparent to the processes through which a world and a self are continually disclosed.”
“Attention is one of the principal ways experience can investigate itself.
It can narrow around a single sensation, widen to include an entire field, remain with one object, move rapidly between objects, or relax its effort altogether. Each mode reveals something different. Narrow attention exposes detail. Wide attention reveals context. Sustained attention reveals change. Shifting attention shows how easily the apparent centre of experience can move.
What first appears simple often becomes more complex under examination.
A bodily sensation may divide into pressure, temperature, movement, emotional tone, and interpretation. A thought may be noticed not as something consciously constructed, but as something that has already appeared.
Attention can sometimes loosen these layers from one another. It can reveal the difference between what is sensed and what is inferred, between what appears and what is immediately said about it.
This makes attention a powerful instrument of inquiry. But it is not a neutral or perfectly obedient one.
Attention is repeatedly captured by pain, novelty, fear, desire, habit, and bodily need. It wanders before we decide to let it wander. It contracts around anxious thoughts. It becomes absorbed in memories and imagined futures. Even the intention to redirect it may arise without any clear sense of having produced that intention.
Attention is therefore only partly voluntary.
We can influence it, train it, and create conditions in which it becomes more stable. We cannot command it absolutely. Its instability is not merely an obstacle to investigation; it is part of what the investigation reveals.
An attempt to remain with the breath, a sound, or a visual object quickly demonstrates this. Attention departs. A phrase begins to repeat. A memory enters. The supposed observer discovers that the act of observing is itself shaped by processes outside deliberate control.
This does not mean there is no agency. It means that agency is limited, situated, and entangled with the processes it tries to direct.
It is also useful to distinguish attention from awareness.
Awareness is the broader presence of experience. Attention is the selective emphasis placed upon some part of that experience.
At any moment, more may be present than is being attended to: peripheral vision, bodily pressure, background sound, mood, posture, expectation. Attention brings some of this into prominence while other aspects recede. The field remains richer than its centre.
This distinction matters when we speak of “attending to awareness itself.”
Awareness may not be another object waiting to be selected. It may not stand beside sounds, thoughts, colours, and sensations as one more content of experience. What can be noticed instead is that all of these contents, including the movement of attention, share the fact of appearing.
The inquiry then changes.
Rather than searching for awareness as a hidden object, one begins to notice the condition common to everything that is present.
This indicates that experience has a structured field, that some contents become focal while others remain peripheral, and that attention can alter this organisation in systematic ways.
Attention is not the only means by which experience changes. Breathing alters arousal. Movement changes perception. Imagination introduces new contents. Language changes interpretation. Environment, posture, fatigue, silence, music, and emotion all shape what becomes salient.
Yet attention remains central because it can move across all of these domains. It can examine sensation, perception, thought, emotion, memory, bodily state, and its own activity.
It is an instrument operating within the very field it investigates.
That instrument has limits. Intense focus may reveal detail while concealing context. Wide attention may disclose the whole while losing precision. Observation may alter what is observed. Attention may clarify experience, but it may also organise experience according to its own habits and expectations.
A careful investigation must therefore examine not only what attention reveals, but also what it excludes, distorts, and fails to hold.
Attention does not give a being sovereign control over awareness. Its value lies elsewhere.
It provides a limited but unusually direct way for experience to become more transparent to its own organisation. What begins as an attempt to use attention as a tool gradually reveals attention itself as one of the processes appearing within the field.”
From “The Book of Sand” (Vol. XIX, No. 3).
Image: “Escada (Staircase)” by Lygia Clark (1951).
“If the Prima Materia is understood as Awareness as Such, then it behaves like Mercury.
Not ordinary quicksilver, but the alchemical Mercury: elusive, transformative, difficult to contain, and capable of entering into many forms without becoming identical with any of them.
Awareness has a similar quality. The moment we try to grasp it, we encounter a thought, sensation, image or feeling. Awareness itself never settles into a single object. It seems to take the shape of whatever appears within it, while remaining irreducible to that shape.
This is what makes it mercurial.
Experience continually forms, dissolves and reforms. A sound moves from background to foreground. A thought becomes a conviction, then is seen again as a thought. An emotion that seemed indivisible can be recognised as bodily tension, memory, interpretation and impulse.
Awareness allows these structures to loosen.
Its dissolving power does not destroy experience. It releases experience from rigid identification. A thought can remain present without being taken as fact. An emotion can be felt without becoming the whole self. A perspective can be recognised as partial without becoming meaningless.
Mercury also symbolises conjunction. It was imagined as a medium through which different substances could combine. Awareness plays a similar role within experience. Sensation, thought, memory, emotion and perception can be distinguished because they appear within a common field. Their differences remain, but they are no longer isolated.
The alchemical problem of “fixing Mercury” also has an experiential parallel. Awareness does not need to be made stable. What is unstable is our recognition of it.
There may be a moment in which thoughts and sensations are clearly seen as forms within awareness. Then identification returns and the wider field is forgotten. The recognition was real, but volatile.
The work is to make that recognition more durable without turning it into a rigid doctrine. Awareness must remain open, responsive and capable of receiving new form.
The Prima Materia is mercurial because experience resists final form. It divides, combines, dissolves and reappears, while the condition of its appearing is never exhausted by any one configuration.”
“The stream of consciousness presents a fundamental difficulty: experience is continuously changing, yet we often seek some stable point from which to observe or control it.
Thought follows thought. Memory alters emotion. Emotion narrows attention. Bodily states influence what becomes salient. The sense of self is repeatedly reconstructed within this movement.
The obvious response is to search for an anchor.
But any particular anchor (the breath, a sensation, a sound, an image) is itself another changing content of consciousness.
This suggests a different approach.
The relevant distinction may not be between movement and stillness, but between being absorbed in a content and recognising the wider field in which that content appears.
A thought can dominate awareness without exhausting it.
When a thought is noticed as a thought, the thought may remain unchanged, but the structure of experience has altered. What was previously transparent becomes available as an object of awareness.
The same applies to emotion, bodily tension, memory and even the sense of being carried away.
The practical movement is therefore from the story to the field.
Instead of attending exclusively to what a thought says, attention includes the other conditions present at the same time: bodily sensation, sound, vision, affective tone and the broader organisation of experience.
This does not produce a position outside consciousness. It produces a different configuration within consciousness.
That distinction matters.
There need be no detached observer standing beyond the stream. Metacognitive recognition can arise within the stream itself. Consciousness can become partially responsive to its own current organisation.
The resulting freedom is limited but real.
The mind may sometimes be asking for an absolute guarantee that cannot be obtained. A different response allows the question to remain unresolved:
Perhaps this possibility is true; perhaps it is not. I do not need to settle it now.
One may not choose the next thought, the next feeling or the next association. But one can sometimes recognise a pattern, widen attention, interrupt automatic continuation, or allow a process to pass without reinforcing it.
The goal is not perfect detachment. It is the recovery of enough psychological space to choose the next action without first obeying the demand for certainty.
However, continuous self-observation could itself become another rigid cognitive state.
A more plausible practice consists of repeated transitions between absorption and recognition.
Thinking is happening.
Attention has narrowed.
The field can widen.
These moments reveal that identification is not an all-or-nothing metaphysical condition. It is a variable organisation of attention, salience and self-representation. The stream of consciousness itself can be seen as a self-organising process.
There may be no final, immovable foundation available within experience. Every attempted object of certainty can itself become another appearance.
The absence of such a foundation need not lead to chaos.
Continuity can exist without an unchanging substance. The self can persist as an organised process rather than a fixed entity. Attention can move without being entirely captive to what it encounters.
The problem, then, is not that the river moves.
The problem is that we repeatedly mistake the current that presently carries us for the whole of experience.
The river does not have to become quiet before life can continue.”
Begin with a sustained sensation: the pressure of the body against a chair, the hum of a room, the rhythm of breathing, the field of vision. Stay with it long enough to notice that its apparent continuity is composed of small changes. Intensity shifts. Boundaries blur. Attention wanders and returns. What seemed stable turns out to be a changing pattern held together over time.
From there, widen attention.
The sensation changes, thoughts arise, sounds enter and disappear, yet experience continues. This does not prove that awareness is an eternal substance or an unchanging thing behind the mind. Awareness is not encountered in the same way as a sound, an image, or a bodily feeling. It has no obvious colour, texture, location, or edge.
What can be noticed is simpler: throughout a period of conscious experience, different contents continue to appear. Awareness can therefore be approached as the ongoing condition of their appearing, rather than as another object among them.
The movement is from the relatively persistent content of experience to the persistence of experiencing itself.
Do not search for a special sensation called awareness. Let attention become less narrowly attached to whatever it is noticing. Include the sensation, its changes, the thoughts about it, and the wider field in which all of this occurs.
What remains is not a fixed object, but the continuing openness in which experience takes form.”
“Experience is given in the sense that it arrives before deliberate choice. You do not usually choose the next sensation, mood, memory, or thought before it occurs. There is a passivity at the root of consciousness: something is already happening before the reflective self claims authorship.
But what is given is never entirely raw. Experience is already structured by embodiment, memory, expectation, language, habit, affect, and attention. You do not first receive neutral data and then interpret it. The perceived world arrives already articulated as meaningful: threatening, familiar, desirable, irrelevant, beautiful, shameful, mine.
So “all experience is given” does not mean experience is an unquestionable revelation of reality. It means experience precedes reflective control while still being shaped by conditions that may remain hidden.
If all experience is given, then experience is the only place in which awareness can be encountered.
Because experience is given, I need not obey, elaborate, or identify with everything that appears. But I cannot reach awareness by excluding experience, since awareness is disclosed through the very appearing I am tempted to ignore.
The movement is therefore not away from experience, but from absorption in its contents toward sensitivity to the whole event of experiencing.
If awareness is the condition in which experience appears, then awareness is not another layer beneath experience. It is not a more subtle experience waiting behind ordinary experience. Whatever you find (silence, spaciousness, luminosity, absence of thought, formlessness) is still something given. It is another configuration of experience.
In contemplation the structure of experience can become visible: content is occurring, identification is occurring, and neither is inevitable.
We infer or intimate continuity through the fact that changing contents remain manifest.
The movement then shifts from “I am the witness of experience” toward “experiencing is occurring, and the distinction between witness and witnessed is itself appearing within it.”
No particular content, state, or self-representation exhausts the fact of appearing.
From there, awareness is not possessed as an object. It is approached through the increasing transparency of experience to its own arising.”
From “The Book of Sand” (Vol. XVI, No. 36).
Image: Title page of “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” by William Blake (1794).
“Attention does more than select one object from an otherwise unchanged field. By narrowing, widening, sustaining, shifting, or releasing, it changes the structure of experience itself.
Narrowing attention creates something like a chamber. One object becomes vivid while the surrounding field recedes. This allows precision, but it can also make the chamber feel like the whole of reality.
Widening attention opens the field. Peripheral sounds, bodily sensations, thoughts, and spatial atmosphere can appear together. The result is less like a spotlight and more like a hall in which relationships and context become visible.
Sustaining attention resembles a long corridor. It gives continuity to experience by holding an orientation across time. This enables depth, though it can become fixation when attention continues after its purpose has been exhausted.
Shifting attention is the turn or threshold. What was peripheral becomes central, and the field reorganises around a new concern. A small movement of attention can disclose a very different world.
Releasing attention is different from widening it. It relaxes the effort to select, hold, and exclude. Experience continues, but without being organised so firmly around a single centre.
These configurations can be imagined as rooms and passages within a labyrinth. They are not literal compartments of the mind, but temporary structures formed within Awareness.
The self also changes from room to room. In concentration, it may feel like a controller directing attention. In a widened field, it may appear as one element among others. In release, the division between observer and observed may soften.
The aim is not to remain permanently in the widest or quietest room. Each attentional structure has its value. Integration lies in recognising where attention has taken us, seeing what that configuration reveals and conceals, and becoming more capable of moving through the labyrinth without mistaking any one room for the whole.
At times, attention may release its structures so completely that the labyrinth itself seems to fall away.
The walls were made of selection: this rather than that, centre rather than periphery, observer rather than observed. When that selective activity relaxes, the divisions between rooms can become less definite. Chamber, corridor, threshold, and traveller are seen as configurations appearing within a more fundamental openness.
What remains can be described as pure Awareness: not an empty absence, but the field in which every room, wall, thought, sensation, and sense of self appears.
This does not require the claim that all distinctions vanish permanently or that ordinary experience is unreal. The labyrinth returns whenever attention narrows, holds, divides, and moves. Yet the dissolution reveals that its walls were never absolute. They were temporary structures within Awareness, rather than boundaries imposed upon Awareness itself.
The labyrinth is real as experience, but it is not the whole of what contains it.”
“Much of our suffering begins when attention contracts around a single thought, emotion or problem. Whatever occupies the centre of consciousness comes to feel like the whole of reality. Yet every act of attention also leaves something outside its frame.
One way to live more clearly is to become more skilful with attention itself. Sometimes it needs to be narrow and precise. At other times it needs to widen, allowing the body, the surrounding world, memory, anticipation and the present moment to coexist within a single field. The goal is not permanent detachment or diffuse awareness, but the freedom to move between focus and openness as circumstances require.
Flexible attention involves narrowing, widening, sustaining, shifting, and releasing attention deliberately. Widening attention allows you to experience the simultaneity of the surrounding field.
The recognition of distraction is not a failure of attention. It is the appearance of metacognition: awareness becoming sensitive to the organisation of its own contents.
As the aperture widens, thoughts and emotions remain important, but they no longer define the entirety of experience. Anger becomes something present rather than something that completely possesses us. Anxiety becomes one pattern within a much larger landscape. Even the familiar sense of “I” can be recognised as part of experience instead of its unquestioned centre.
This shift does not diminish engagement with life. It makes fuller engagement possible. A wider awareness can hold complexity without rushing to simplify it, remain present during uncertainty, and respond rather than merely react.
Perhaps the simplest practice is also the most powerful. Whenever you notice yourself becoming contracted, pause for a moment. Feel the body. Broaden your awareness to include the wider field of experience. Let thoughts, feelings and the sense of self all appear together, then respond from that larger perspective.
Over time, the aperture becomes less something we force open and more a way of inhabiting the world. Experience is no longer reduced to its loudest contents. It is received with greater breadth, greater depth, and greater clarity.”
“The question of freedom is often framed too starkly. Either the self is imagined as a sovereign power standing outside the order of causes, or it is reduced to an effect among effects, carried along by forces it neither understands nor directs. Both pictures miss the structure of lived agency.
A will entirely free from causation would be unintelligible. If an action arose without relation to memory, temperament, value, attention, or circumstance, it would not be recognisably ours. It would be an eruption without character. It would have no inward signature.
Yet a life cannot be understood as a simple mechanical sequence either. Human action includes interpretation, anticipation, inhibition, imagination, and response. These are not interruptions of causality. They are forms causality takes when it passes through awareness.
The self is not a sealed origin of action. It is a finite centre in which many lines of force meet: bodily disposition, personal history, language, desire, fear, memory, and the pressure of the present situation. To say that a person chooses is not to say that the choice has no causes. It is to say that the causes pass through an organised field of perception and value. The action bears the form of the one through whom it occurs.
Here the pattern is the ordered field of causes, records, attention, memory, and circumstance through which a finite self acts, becomes aware of what acts through it, and may partly transform its future course. Freedom, then, is not exemption from that pattern. It is participation in the pattern at the level of awareness.
This changes the meaning of determinism. Determinism is often pictured as a chain running behind us, pushing each moment into the next. But a human life is shaped not only by prior events. It is shaped by meanings, expectations, remembered injuries, loyalties, imagined futures, and the felt weight of what matters. These too are causes, though they do not resemble physical impacts. They operate as structures of disclosure. They decide what appears salient, threatening, desirable, possible.
A person acts from the world as it appears to them. Change the appearance, and the field of action changes with it.
This is why attention has a privileged place in any serious account of freedom. Attention alters salience. It changes which features of the world become vivid and which fall back. It can reveal a compulsion as a compulsion, a fear as a fear, a desire as something less absolute than it first seemed. Such recognition does not place the self outside causality. It introduces another cause into the field: the cause of seeing.
A pattern that remains unseen tends to act as necessity. A pattern that becomes visible may still be powerful, but it is no longer identical with the whole of experience. Space opens around it. The self may still be carried by anger, fear, or longing, but these no longer occupy the entire field as unquestioned reality. Awareness has differentiated itself from the force moving through it.
This differentiation is one of the roots of freedom.
The same point can be made through the idea of record. Every life is shaped by what has been inscribed in it. Memory records. Habit records. The body records. So do language, family, work, affection, humiliation, success, and repetition. These records are not dead material stored behind the present. They continue to operate in the present as tendencies of perception and action.
To become free is not to erase the record. It is to enter a changed relation to it.
A memory may be reinterpreted. A habit may weaken. A reflex of defence may be noticed before it completes itself. A familiar story about the self may lose some of its authority. None of this occurs by magic. New conditions enter: insight, fatigue, conversation, discipline, contemplation, consequence. These become part of the causal field. They alter what the next moment inherits.
Freedom is therefore historical. It develops through the modification of conditions. It is rarely absolute, and it is often uneven. A person may be lucid in one region of life and almost entirely governed in another. The self is not uniformly free or unfree. It is a layered structure, with different degrees of transparency, compulsion, and participation.
This gives a more exact account of moral responsibility.
If every action arises from conditions, judgment should become less crude. A person does not invent themselves from nothing. Their action expresses a history larger than conscious intention. But responsibility remains real because response itself becomes part of the field that shapes future action. To hold oneself or another responsible is to acknowledge that a pattern has appeared and must be answered.
Responsibility is the serious recognition that actions disclose and reinforce forms of life. Some forms require correction, restraint, reparation, or transformation. A responsible self is not one that stands outside causality, but one that can increasingly participate in the causality moving through it.
There is also the larger question of time.
From within life, the future appears open. We deliberate because we do not possess the whole. Possibility is real for the situated self. It belongs to the inner structure of temporal experience. To choose is to stand within an unfinished horizon, where several paths can be imagined and only one can be enacted.
From a wider perspective, however, the whole temporal form may be conceived as complete. The life has a shape. Each decision belongs to that shape. What appears from within as uncertainty may appear from the standpoint of totality as an intelligible pattern. This does not cancel the reality of deliberation. It places deliberation within a larger order.
The same event can be lived as choice and understood as structure.
There is no contradiction in this, provided the levels are not confused. From within time, one must deliberate, attend, respond, and act. From the standpoint of the whole, those acts are part of the completed form. The internal drama of decision is not an illusion imposed upon reality. It is one of the ways reality becomes articulate within time.
Fatalism arises when the wider view is imported into ordinary life in a crude form. It says: if the whole is complete, participation is irrelevant. But participation is not outside the whole. It is one of the means by which the whole has the form it has. Thought, hesitation, courage, refusal, and attention are not additions to reality from elsewhere. They are reality taking shape through a finite centre.
This allows determinism to be understood without fatalism.
The world may be lawful. The self may be conditioned. The temporal whole may be complete from a standpoint unavailable to ordinary consciousness. Yet the finite centre still matters because it is one of the places where causality becomes aware of itself. Its choices are not violations of order. They are order becoming inward, reflective, and capable of transformation.
The highest form of freedom is therefore not arbitrary selection among alternatives. It is the deepening transparency of action. A person becomes freer as they understand more clearly what acts through them, what they serve, what they repeat, and what they are capable of changing. Freedom grows as compulsion becomes visible, as attention widens, and as the self ceases to mistake every impulse for necessity.
Such freedom remains finite. It does not grant mastery over the whole of life. It does not remove conditioning, vulnerability, or consequence. But it changes the mode of participation. The self is no longer only driven by the pattern. It becomes a place where the pattern is disclosed, questioned, and sometimes altered.
To act freely is not to act without causes. It is to act from causes that have, at least in part, become luminous within awareness.”
From “The Book of Sand” (Vol. XI, No. 22).
Image: “Tree of Knowledge No. 5” by Hilma af Klint.
“Your sense of self is another structure in Awareness.
This does not mean the self is unreal, or that ordinary identity should be dismissed as a fiction. The self is real as a pattern of experience. It is composed of memory, bodily orientation, emotional tone, personal history, and the felt centre from which life seems to unfold.
The self has coherence. It persists across time. It organises experience around the sense that this is happening to me. It allows responsibility, continuity, relationship, and action. Without some form of self-structure, ordinary life would become almost impossible.
But the self can also be observed. Its moods change. Its boundaries contract under fear and soften under contemplation. Its narratives can become rigid, or they can loosen. This suggests that the self is not identical with Awareness itself. It is one of the ways Awareness becomes locally organised.
The practical error is to absolutise the self: to treat this finite pattern as the final subject of experience. When that happens, life is interpreted through possession, defence, regret, anticipation, and personal narrative. Experience becomes tightly centred around the question of what everything means for “me.”
Non-identification does not require destroying the self. It means seeing the self more clearly. The self continues to function, but it is no longer mistaken for the whole field of experience.
The sense of self is a relatively stable structure within Awareness: a pattern through which experience is organised around a felt centre.
This preserves the reality of the self without making it ultimate. The self is not outside Awareness. It is not opposed to Awareness. It is one of the forms Awareness takes as finite life.”
From “Liber Arenae” (Vol. XII, No. 3).
Image from “Atalanta Fugiens” by Michael Maier (1617).
