The Self-Forgetting That Gives Birth to the World

You cannot see your own eyes. Whatever you look at, you must stand apart from it, at a certain distance, in order to know it. The same principle applies on a much larger scale: if the infinite can know nothing outside itself, how does a world, full of multiplicity and colour, come to appear within it at all?

All experience takes place in duality – apparent duality – in the relationship between subject and object. To know or perceive anything, we must stand apart from it and regard it from a distance. This is why the eyes cannot see themselves: they can perceive only what lies at a distance from them.

The familiar expression ‘you cannot have your cake and eat it’ points to the same principle. Once you have eaten the cake, there is no distance between you and it; the cake has become one with you. For that reason, you can no longer have it or know it as an object. To have the cake – that is, to see it, to know it – it must stand apart from you and, therefore, you have not yet eaten it. The moment you take it into yourself, it becomes you, and in becoming you it is no longer available to be known.

Thus the infinite cannot by itself know anything, for to know something it would have to stand apart from it. And to stand apart from anything, the infinite would have to limit itself. It would have to become other than the object it knew or perceived. It would have to enter into a subject–object relationship with that thing, and at that point it would no longer be infinite.

The infinite cannot stand apart from itself; where could it go? Therefore, for the infinite, for God’s infinite being, there is only God’s infinite being. There is only its own self-luminosity. In that light, there is no creation, no form, no world, no self, no manifestation.