WHAT MATTERS ABOUT MATTER
Matter is more than what we typically think of as matter. There’s more to it than meets the eye, more to it than its density and mass, more to it than the popularization of it as but dumb putty to be molded or manipulated by an overseeing mind.
We commonly take as a given the notion of mind over matter, but rarely consider the notion of mind as matter, or matter as externalized mind.
Matter matters.
Though denser than mind, soul, or spirit, matter is not necessarily lesser than them, because it fundamentally is just the outside-ness of them crystallized into relative solidity, and without an outside, what can we say about an inside?
We have to be especially careful with language here, for what’s outside typically (or conventionally) contains what’s inside, but in the case of matter, what’s outside is contained by what’s inside, in the sense that a greater depth contains a lesser depth.
And so the body does not contain the soul (our individualized essence), but the soul contains the body — and in a even deeper sense, the body does not contain the soul, but rather is an expression of the soul. What we truly are is not making an appearance in a body, but as a body.
So let us cast a kinder eye on matter, and cease viewing it as a mere sheath or sensory integument for (or impediment to realizing) higher realities, for the densified outside-ness that characterizes it constitutes not a literal container or housing project for what’s inside, but rather a precipitated extension of what’s inside, providing a medium for that interiority or central depth to relate to what lies outside it.
Matter, as part of its job description, does the dirty work, and doesn’t really mind, because that’s its nature. Someone has to take out the garbage and build the highways. Grunt work matters, and as a matter-of-fact needs to be honored as such.
Mind is itself a kind of mass-less matter, the interiority of which could be called soul, or the individualized core of what we truly are. Soul has less of a problem with matter than does mind, because it has more of a view. The deeper inside we are, the higher our view. What’s further up the mountain can see more than what’s at lower elevations.
Inside and outside are but inseparable sides of a primal geography, together on their knees before the same old yet everfresh Mystery. When inside and outside are lovers, we know a love that cannot fail, a love that is both ocean and sail.
Once again poetry has me by the jugular, and I don’t mind at all. There’s a part in The Fountain (see my review in my January 2007 Newsletter) when the Mayan priest kneels, leans back his head, and bares his throat, inviting the transfigured conquistador to cut it, so that he can be one with the Sacred. It wasn’t just a romanticized primitive moment, but rather a full-blooded signifier of extraordinary awe and sacrifice, the sort of sacrifice through which we die into a deeper Life.
Taking in a scene like this, really feeling and absorbing it, making it our own until it’s not so much ours as it is us, generates a wondrously sobering and illuminating leap through various hoops of mind, until there’s no everyday mind left, no mapmaker, no supplier of meaning, nothing but What-Really-Matters.
My sentences are erasing themselves almost as fast I type them. They look back and see nothing. I look back and see everything. All of it is there, both outside and inside me, for all of it was necessary to bring “me” into being, even though it did not all arise just to bring me into being, except in the narcissistic outback of my egoity.
Yes, I matter, but no more than you. Of course, my mind disagrees, but that’s its nature. Matter keeps arising, keeps passing, and through it I live, we live, whatever we may be.
I’m tempted to look back at the beginning of this essay, but don’t dare, not because I’ll be turned to stone, and not because my beloved will die, but because this wild flow, this unkempt opening and spilling, is more me than the me writing this, which amounts to nothing more than me letting what I’m writing outwrite me.
Now inside and outside have traded places, and no one’s making a fuss about it. What is most deeply within contains all that is outside it. Reality’s Möbius nature — one infinite surface of infinite depth — takes all the mappings of inside and outside, interiority and exteriority, higher and lower, horizontality and verticality, and makes light of it.
There is, however, no leveling or flattening of differences here, no homogenizing of distinctions, no cosmic rolling pin turning it all into one gigantic plain, like some ultra-great pizza awaiting its toppings and corresponding appetites.
Matter matters. But what is matter? Solid stuff? Concretized mind? A torte of atomic and subatomic particles/waves/potentialities, dense and elusive and intricate enough to make our mind lick its lips?
Matter is dense, but its density vanishes as we get closer and closer to it. Get really close to matter, and what you will see is gravity and light in endless embrace, creating in their wake something that keeps evolving to — and perhaps also beyond — the point of knowing that it is evolving.
We are not only that something, but also something more, something that cannot be imagined, something that is neither inside nor outside.
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