“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
– Max Planck
“… the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
– Niels Bohr
Samsara and nirvana are One.
– Nagarjuna
WE ARE ALL OBSERVERS: Watchers. On-looking participants in the spectacle we call “the world”. In the arena of life’s day to day affair, we pay the world our casual regard – its ubiquitous presence is taken to be a given; habituated as we are to its comings and its goings – our world (in its manifest appearance) is a thing that most of us (most of the time) take for granted… And perhaps this is a part of our nature; that “part” of the way of things which somehow characterizes the way things are.
Breaking The (Classical) Mold
But while complacent we may be (as watchers and lookers-on) – as “witness” to an omnipresent spectacle, we humans are also creatures of imagination.. So riddle this: Within its myriad of images and all its correlated phenomena – looking “outward” to the world (and) thru the window of our eyes – do we simply find what (we “appear”) to see? Or is it (more) that we see – what we expect to find ..?
Which way does it seem to you?
WHO can say. And the question is more than just rhetorical. When it comes right down to the “chicken or the egg” of it – perhaps it’s because we imagine there to be no “apparent” context in which the “two views” can be teased apart – that when it’s down to what we believe – there is little to distinguish the one proposition from the other. Like the artful sleight of hand (as if “seamless” or invisible), or the rhyme of a well-timed word, bound-up in the rhythm of a tortuous riddle (as if someway we’re “entranced”) – the reflexive question challenges our assumptions by comparing the “vantage” provided by one’s view point to “the situation” of one’s point of view – as if to ask whether (in the end) the two views could ever be “disentangled”.
So much for objectivity… Like being in a kind of Mexican standoff with our “selves”, this curious circumstance of our own perceptual quandary appears to be somehow wired-in to our experience – and therefore seemingly unavoidable… But just like Schrödinger’s elusive cat – however unsettling this may be for us – it is only but the gist of an inexorable dilemma with profound implications for “our human situation”.
Side-stepping for the moment any of its quantum implications (or “uncertainty”), if we take our rhetorical exercise another step further it can all come down to the sim-ple, larger, and more intimately related question of whether an “objective” material world can exist “out there” – independent of ourselves – before we are in the picture to see it; a curious question indeed, but one that few of us ask given all its practical-ities… But regardless of what we may think of it, or however absurd it might appear, and despite all our time spent searching for definitive answers – we will still remain befuddled… Why? Because if we cast as wide a net as possible to ask that broadest of questions: Can the existence of the world be disentangled from the presence of our on-looking selves? – inevitably we will find and must eventually admit – that we cannot escape the “semantics” of our own predicament. Namely – that the existence of a questioner is pre-supposed by “the question” – and that a “who” is out of neces-sity – caught – within the rhetorical frame.
It is as if the querent (our “who” that is in question) – the hypostatized person that’s implied by our subject’s object (or conversely speaking by our object’s subject) – our hypothetical “self” (so to speak) – were somehow at the fulcrum of a peculiar sort of crossroad or rhetorical chiasm; suspended & juxtaposed, or someway superposed at a point midway between mirrored or opposing views (to have someway become “lo-calized”). Looked at systemically or taken as a whole – like an unusual series of twists and turns in an odd sort of maze – in the end – one can not definitively say if it is the world or the mind that perceives it which comes first.* 
It’s like the ordinary palindrome, or simply not seeing the forest for the tree… In the arena of life’s day to day affair – “the question of our consciousness” – would appear to be wedded to a habit for complacency.
Continue on to Chapter 2: “THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS”
The Kerykeion
the telos of history 