The book that is you

There’s a koan like phenomenon detailed in Martin Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of a Work of Art’.

Its the idea that art already exists, an artist just reveals it.

Heidegger argues that truth (aletheia in Greek) literally means unconcealment — the bringing forth of something from hiddenness into the open. Art, for him, is one of the primary ways this happens.

The key idea is that the artwork doesn't create truth from nothing — it reveals what is already there but concealed. He uses the example of a Greek temple: the temple doesn't just sit in a landscape, it opens up a world. It makes the earth, the sky, the divine, and the mortal visible in a way they weren't before.

Why I say that there is a koan like quality to this concept, is that you can mentally think on it- but in doing so it tends to create an image, an action or movment. This gesture that comes to mind, a hand pulling back the veil, implies a certain embodied quality- one that I tend to experience more than I can logically understand.

The intersection between the physical and the infinite depth that everything sprouts out of, is not a thought. It is an embodied gesture. It requires a merging of the unconscious and the conscious- something akin to remembering a dream. The thread of truth is unravelled through the spirit into the conscious mind. When the thread of truth, that is already known to the non-physical self, is able to be brought into memory- that is remembering.

Remember re (again) + member (from Latin membrum — a limb, a part of the body)

To reassemble the parts. To put the body back together.

Its opposite; to dis-member, is to forget. Memory is what holds the body of experience intact. To remember, carries the spirit of union, this is the thread previously mentioned.

Imagine means to make an image inside yourself. When I ask this of you, try not to invent or copy what I describe into your mind- but find a subtle sense of revealing what already dwells within.

I would like you to imagine a book.

A book that is completely yours.

It is a book written in the depths of your being, dwelling and immaculate.

In interacting with this book, see that there is really no separation between you and this book.

You are it and it is you.

See at once, that the book is already written.

And yet, through the conscious realisation of the book, you are writing it.

And it,

is writing you.

Truth seems to have a somewhat lucid quality when interacted with. It cannot be spoken in the factual sense, but it seems that in meeting each moment exactly as it is, truth can be lived, embodied.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”— Laozi, Tao Te Ching

"What thus happens in the strife: the inauguration of the open in the struggle between the unconcealed and the concealed, the coming-out of hiding and deception — this self-contained event is the happening of what we call truth." — Martin Heidegger, The Origin of a Work of Art

The exchange between you and the book (the book that is you), is seamless, because they are one and the same. In fact, in the recalling of the book itself in the conscious mind is not the stumbling upon a new thought. It has a sense of remembering something you have been doing this whole time. Only this time, your mind is conscious of it- which is a form of writing the book which is already written. Painting the artwork that was already there.

Even the realisation that this has been happening, is just another form of the eternal happening. Regardless of whether you realised it or not, it would continue on in its own way. Making the realisation of it, is somewhat obsolete or at least just another natural and precious passage written or referred to in the book.

مكتوبMaktub — "It is written."

(Arabic proverb)

Notice Maktub does not mean “It was written” or “It will be written”- but it is written, in the present tense.

It feels as if it sits outside of tense all together, a sense of simultaneous completeness and motion.

Koan — from Japanese 公案 (kōan)

公 (kō) — public, official, open 案 (an) — case, record, desk, matter for consideration

a public case or an official record — borrowing the language of the law court. A matter brought forward for consideration and resolution.

The Zen tradition took this legal metaphor and turned it inward. The koan became a case brought before the court of the mind — except the mind, in trying to judge it rationally, finds it cannot. The koan is designed to be unsolvable by ordinary thinking. It doesn't resolve — it ruptures. It breaks the thinking mind open so that something else can come through.

In the sense that a koan is an open case, something evident in the world that evades resolution by the human mind- so, too is Aletheia.

If truth is already evident, Aletheia asks of me “what is it that the veil is made of?” what is obstructing something that already exists, where am I unwilling to see what is already whole? Is the veil made up of my own blindness?

So where does this leave you?

You are a book, that is written, by you. And so what is the value of this?

Take a moment for me to imagine this immaculate book of yours again. Not as if it were a dream, but an experience of reality.

The contents of the book are written and lived moment to moment. Each page holding treasures lived in experience, yet often unknown to your conscious mind. Each page a treasure, a script played on the universal stage. A true gift to others. In speaking the pages of your text, the text that reside deeply inside, you translate a wisdom so precise and direct. It is not a language that references something else that it is not, it is the direct window to that which is you- not symbolic of it, but actually it.

The value is that this book is entirely you, written in completeness.

You may not yet be translating directly from this book of you.