You Are An Aperture

Watts's aperture image is the closing recognition of the body politic, the answer to the whole diagnostic chain that runs from Hammurabi through the Greek tragedians, the Hebrew prophets, the Tao Te Ching, the Kali Yuga, the monomyth, the existentialist confrontation with the silence, and the counterculture's discovery that the institutional version of meaning had failed. What every diagnosis has been pointing at, finally, is this.

The recognition does not require agreement on its metaphysics. For the theist, this is what the mystics in every tradition have always said. Meister Eckhart: my ground and God's ground are one ground. The Kingdom is within. Tat Tvam Asi. Al-Hallaj said it and was crucified for saying it. For the atheist, this is Sagan: the cosmos knowing itself through consciousness. The iron in your blood was forged in a dying star. The universe spent thirteen billion years creating the conditions for matter to become aware of itself, and then it did, through you. For the nihilist, this is Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill, picking up the boulder, fully himself, refusing to look away. The aperture fully open, without theology. For the Buddhist, original face. For the Hindu, Atman is Brahman.

The civilizational conclusion follows. The body politic is sick because its members have forgotten who they are. That is the diagnosis beneath every other diagnosis. Hammurabi's law drifted because those enforcing it forgot they were expressions of the same ground as those they judged. The tragic hero falls because they confuse their role with their identity. The Kali Yuga is the age in which the recognition is most thoroughly obscured. The counterculture was the body politic trying to break the taboo. This recognition is the only cure that goes deep enough, because nothing shallower addresses what is actually wrong.