Always and Forever — Clarity
The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.
[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake.
This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity.
The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal.
The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down?
She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript.
Judging by the information in this work alone she would surely have passed as highly educated during the sixteenth century, a time when most of the women and a good percentage of the men did not know how to read or write.
One would have expected to find some evidence of her scholarship in the writings of the time, or documentation of her life in any of the historical documents, but there isn’t any.
We often feel like she never existed, that maybe she was just as much the master’s creation as his drawings, or his concepts.]
Clarity is a subtle quality of matter and mind. It happens when the components of being align themselves in a way that allows knowledge to pass through.
Clarity is always simple.
A diamond is simple, love is simple, a perfect geometric shape is simple.
Clarity removes all doubt and all extraneous detail.
There are no shadows and no uncharted territories in clarity, and there is no potential either, everything is out into the light for all to see.
Whenever you strive for clarity, remember that nothing is clear but what already happened, what is already known, and that whenever you see it, it is the aftermath of a long-drawn struggle to remove inconsequential details and connect the pertinent ones in the simplest configuration that makes sense.
Honor this struggle, which is often the fruit of many years of hard work, sometimes life times. Many things that are perfectly clear to us now have been nothing of the sort for most of history. The goal is to see through the lump of coal and find the diamond, never expect the diamond to just reveal itself to you.
For instance, when you want to represent a real object on a flat surface, depth doesn’t disappear, it gets concentrated into a single point, the point where all distant lines seem to vanish.
This classic rule of perspective which is so obvious to us now frustrated the generations before us for centuries, another blatant example of a truth that eludes you until you are ready to understand it.
You can’t put clarity back in the box after the fact either; if there was a hierarchy for the things you can’t unknow, those blessed with clarity would be right at the top.
Clarity comes in flashes, in sudden bursts of recognition, and it rarely needs additional explanations.
[There is something immediately noticeable about this manuscript: its format is very consistent, a strange quality for an artifact this old, especially one written over more than a decade.
The ink color is always the same, the page layout is always the same, and it keeps the lectures separate from each other.
If one considers that besides the fact that the work was left unbound, it stands to reason the intent was for the reader to reorganize these concepts, according to their own logic and priorities.
We even floated the possibility that the master didn’t think of this work as complete and expected his pupils, and maybe even future contributors to continue it by adding their own concepts.
This would explain the peculiar choice of writing the whole text by hand, and only in one copy, when the invention and popularity of the printing press would have made it so much easier to print multiple copies for wide distribution.
In many respects the manuscript is closer to an incomplete work of art than to a piece of writing.]
Question: why did I say that clarity removes potential.
Think of a perfect gem. The reason there are so few ways in which you can cut it resides in the quality of the gem itself. You can only cut along the planes that form its structure, otherwise you destroy it. It is in the perfect organization of that structure that you find its beauty. That perfect organization doesn’t allow for the unexpected, it is consistent in every detail. You can guess its behavior throughout based on knowing just a little corner.
Potential is a latent ability which can not thrive in perfection, there is nothing that the gem might do in the future that won’t be exactly the same as what it does right now. It would be imperfect otherwise.
Why would you want something without the potential for change? Because some things are ideal models for the rest of reality.
A diamond is an ideal for crystalline structures, divine love is an ideal for love among people.
These ideal models are the dies for all the things which resemble them. They help us group same things into categories.
What did I mean when I said that components of being align themselves to allow knowledge to pass through?
Do you remember the arabesque window panels at Alhambra? They are there to shade the interiors from the extreme heat of the sun at noon. No matter where the sun is during the day, there will be a flourish in that complicated panel to block it, so only indirect light makes it through. Imagine for a second that the sun could shine at an angle perfectly perpendicular to the panel. Suddenly the panel can’t block any sun rays at all, it’s like it isn’t there.
Knowledge becomes clear when all the things that block your understanding are rendered irrelevant.
Now picture having not one, but a series of these panels, which block sunshine at different angles. You could tilt them so that the angles line up and are perpendicular to the sun’s rays, to let the light shine through all of them. That would be absolute knowledge. You can tilt some of them in such a way they let only some colors of the light shine through, but not others. You can combine them in such a way that even though the sun shines perpendicular to most of the panels none of its light will make it into the room.
What if you could isolate knowledge of a particular color in this way, if you’ll allow me the metaphor, to avoid getting distracted by the rest of the rainbow? Knowledge so enhanced would boast many times its regular potency.
Sometimes clarity is so all-encompassing that it defeats the purpose of classifying an object as a part of a set, and instead it permanently fuses it with the underlying model of the set, in a way that won’t allow you to see it as a particular instance, but as a symbol of the set itself.
A throne then becomes the king of chairs instead of being the chair of a king. Samson’s hair becomes the seat of his power instead of one of its physical expressions.
When a common object, a rose, for instance, becomes the symbol of something, you can never see that object as its natural self again, for you it always represents.
Can I elaborate on the fact that clarity comes in flashes?
These moments of certainty may result from a buried struggle, long in the works, but they never feel that way.
Lucidity is instantaneous, almost like a religious experience, like someone has lifted a veil, and you’re left wondering, in disbelief, why you didn’t see that truth before.
Of course perspective lines run to vanishing points, everybody can see that!
These truths are simple, clear and undeniable.
It gets more interesting.
Sometimes you get the truths, but not the explanation for them. It is possible to have total clarity about things and not be able to formulate it. It’s like a light that shone meaning on your life all of a sudden.
Let’s make up a situation to illustrate this concept.
Suppose that you wake up in your room one morning, and it looks exactly the same as before, with one exception: one color is missing. Let’s call that color purple. You don’t mind it at first, maybe it so happened that there were no purple objects in your room and you weren’t paying attention. Still, your mind sees things you aren’t even aware of, and immediately snaps to attention. It sets a reminder for itself to look for the color purple in your surroundings, and it does that all the time now, quietly in the background. It is hard not to notice that there are no purple objects anywhere. Everything looks otherwise the same and nobody else but you seems to notice the absence of purple, and your tentative inquiries into a color that no longer exists stir up worried looks and the occasional snicker. You feel ashamed; you doubt your sanity and try to avoid the subject altogether, so you can live your life in a fashion that is normal, more or less.
There is no shaking the clarity of the fact that purple was stripped from your field of vision.
You can’t explain that to yourself and you certainly can’t discuss it with other people, but you have absolutely no doubt that there used to be a color before, the color you called purple, that everybody used to see and know before, and that is now gone.
You not understanding why only serves to amplify the glaring intensity of this truth.
And just so you don’t think I’m making up absurd stories to illustrate something that doesn’t exist, think about the crusader who lived a secluded life for a few decades and who went to visit Constantinople after the Sublime Porte conquered it and couldn’t find a single church.
For all practical purposes, they never existed.
In his case he has an explanation for what happened, and he doesn’t have to worry about having lost his mind, but that is not always the case.
Many of these instances come with no explanations at all.
How do you deal with having absolute certainty about a fact everybody else denies and for which you have no proof?
We call that religion.
I’m not being facetious and I am not promoting the church of the color purple. I’m just trying to prove to you you can have a conviction that is absolute, that screams at you from every corner of your surroundings, but for which you have no scientific proof. You won’t deny the sky is blue just because you don’t know why yet. In the sky’s case it is easy to affirm that, because you get confirmation from everybody else. Standing your ground about what you see with your own eyes when it contradicts broadly held beliefs is much harder.
You want to know what would be my conclusion in the hypothetical case where purple vanished off the face of the earth? First, I’d try to find simple explanations for it, the ones that would fit in the frame of reference I already have. If one of them works, I’ll accept it and move on. If none of them work, I would have to stop trying to bend the state of fact out of its natural shape and accept the truth, no matter how unlikely: I am no longer in the same world.
You say that that would be insane. Let me ask you something. What is more insane, trying to find evidence of a color everybody else says doesn’t exist so you can prove the entire world wrong or accepting the fact that even though you are sure that color existed only the day before, it looks like that is no longer the case? If you can come to terms with the fact that you are living in a different world now, a purpleless one, you can plan and organize your life.
Should you doubt your own experience of having seen the color you call purple? No. Never second guess your own truth. Never. No matter what you’re told, no matter who will disavow you if you don’t change your mind, no matter how much disappointment, scorn or fury gets summoned against it, your sky won’t stop being blue.
