By day it is as if we look into the world and its reflection appears within us.
By night it is as if something looks into us… and we become worlds.
Sun and Moon.
o ::: •
Day and Night: Sun and Moon
The Sun and the Moon are the two most obvious celestial phenomenon in our common experience. Scientific and academic agendas which reduce phenomenon to data have largely denuded them of their rightful place as astonishing metaphoric and relational catalysts. But without these implications our understandings of ourselves, the universe, and these phenomenon are horribly flattened to the degree that they become uninhabitable.
This problem carries incapacitating ramifications not only for our basic relationship with identity itself, but also for our imagination and creativity which damage our capacity to develop or explore our own intelligence.
The beginning of a resolution involves returning the authority to discover and say what the sun and moon are to the common people. This requires that we decredential ways of knowing which are by their nature prone to submit models of reality as mechanical phenomenon, bereft of intrinsic beingness.
We must put an end to this ideological economy of absence, which reifies the separations its methods promote, and demands that we accept uninhabitable representations of even the most intimate of our relational sources and immersions.
(*> ~ o ~ . <+)
In the daytime, a single star lights the world, and you are also like this. You see the other beings and people outside of you, around you — like a star among stars.
Then, in the nighttime, everything inverts. Your inner light becomes your guide, and the moon and the starry sky become the likeness of your mind.
You see the many beings and the people inside you, like stars against the mystery of your own being — and you are like the Moon — reflecting their essential brightness — experiencing it — as your own.
The Sun
It is said that you cannot eat the Sun, yet without it there is no food. You cannot inhale it, but were it not shining, your lungs wouldn’t help you a bit. In short, every human being, and all of our experiences, ideas, actions, and thought begins with the Sun.
And they keep re-beginning there, with absolutely ceaseless continuity.
It is the most central and local source of energy and flow.
There is nothing more central to human existence, experience and history than the Sun — without which there would be neither Earth nor sky. Although it is not God, if you subtract it from the local equation there are no beings around here to contemplate such lofty matters. As far as we know, the forces unleashed on local spaceTime by Sol essentially ‘gave birth’ to what we call the solar system.
Should it but flutter significantly — all of human language, learning, religion, knowledge, science, engineering and history would instantly disappear into meaninglessness. Yet few humans are aware of the degree to which the Sun figures not only in our daily lives but in the structure and development of the all of the familiar features of our bodies and experience. DNA or language, for example.
The organismal assets ‘encoded in our DNA’ evolved in direct and constant relational feedback with this specific star and its peculiar character. In fact, you could call DNA ‘an intimate organismal expression of solar(terrestrial(lunar)) relation’. All human languages — and the minds with which we compose and interpret them — share this oft overlooked feature — they bear within their structure and meaning the signature of the local star.
We are as much children of this peculiar star as we are of our own parents, or our planet and its moon. It is no mere metaphor that light penetrates the atmospheric membrane of Earth, fertilizing her ‘ever virginal’ substance like a female egg held within the gravitic womb of a male star. Every single feature of human character and experience emerges only within this relationship. Not surprisingly, many (if not most) ancient peoples experienced themselves as the children (and agents) of the Sun.
Its emanations, as light and heat, bring renewed life to the world and fuel the photosynthetic processes that support the atmosphere’s oxygenation. Even in the deserts, where the harsh threat of dehydration holds sway, it is as if the Sun’s daytime parade charges the very sands themselves with the life that will emerge from them nocturnally to seek its fulfillment. Even the frozen ‘wastes’ are a testament to the Sun’s relationship with the Earth: less heat = more stasis. More heat = faster biotime.
At dawn, a surprising variety of creatures begin the day with a vocal expression of gladness and recognition to the rising star. Throughout the day, bees and other creatures will navigate by utilizing the unique polarizations of sunlight. The living world of diurnal creatures awakens to activity as if having been charged and inspired by mere exposure to the Sun.
At sunset many creatures explode into a similarly energetic farewell ceremony. I feel confident that a part of that activity is expressing the peculiar weather and influence of the day’s luminous transmissions, receptions and transformations.
Penetrating, dominant, authorial and demanding — the Sun knows few equals amongst the experience of terrestrial organisms, and nearly all of them exist as epicycles within the broader cycles of day and night, birth and death, and the transitions and seasons which depend upon solar, lunar, and terrestrial relationships. Praised for abundance and blamed for famine, the Sun often held the place of a God, or the Provider, and, again, with good reason: with something that profound in common evidence, it must have taken quite some imagination to declare it was not God. Nothing can hold a candle to the Sun.
Now that we have paid appropriate homage and reminded ourselves of certain important matters, let us examine the cycles of day and night and the roles of the Sun and moon; for they carry with them a variety of lost features of meaning and character, many of which are crucial to the foundations of our capacities for understanding itself, and thus, to any specific goal of understanding we may undertake.
.o. ~ o ~ .•.
The Day
When the bright twin rises, the dark twin disappears almost entirely. To detect the dark twin during the day, the bright twin must be almost entirely blocked out… but the reverse is rarely the case…
By day there is a single source of light which trumps all common and most possible sources. Gone are the twinkling patterns of nightstars. The Moon is absent, or at best a ghost in white and blue.
One source illuminates the dayside of Earth for all living beings. Its energetic emanations penetrate and illumine the atmosphere and all it contains, authoring color and enforcing detail.. We experience the peculiar sensory delights and discriminations of color and visual detail. Water comes to life with reflections.
By day, you see and know because of a brightness overwhelming to the eye. Thus the sun does not attract the eye — but instead activates it, directs it, informs it such that you do not so much see the Sun, but that upon which it shines.
And you, by day, are like this: you are of one mind, one body. You do not so much see yourself as what you are immersed in. You direct yourself into experience, and you know reality largely by what is reflected back to you. You are unified — and the many beings appear outside of you. It is as if you become the Sun and they are the many stars.
Your mind’s focus expression bounce off the external world, bringing forth detail and reflections everywhere — of color or even images — such as those appearing on the surfaces of still water.
By day, you own mind is like the Sun. Your consciousness is relatively unified, penetrating, and your eyes drink in the reflections your mind may direct them toward. You easily distinguish between things because the almost inescapable brightness seems to demand as well as support such discriminations.
Within us, in the daylight, specificity reigns.
.l. ~ o ~ .t.
The Night
By day the world is color. At night the colors disappear. But if you follow them you will learn a secret: they retreat into us, and become dreaming.
At night the entire paradigm inverts. With the departure of the Sun, the veil of darkness advances rapidly, color gives way to contrast, detail to shifting shadows, and certainty of form and identity to doubt. Gone are the almost obligatory discriminations of daylight, and gone too are the colorful and detailed reflections.
The swirling suggestive blankets of darkness and shadows are the hallmarks of the changing of the guard: generality rules here.
In the place of sunlight a liquid mystery envelopes us. The riddles thus implied pull us more into their embrace as the stars emerge above — when the sky is clear enough to reveal them. What is seen in the sky will soon be brought within ourselves, and like that sky, we shall contain many stars.
It is as if our identity becomes multiple — not to the degree that we do not know ourselves, but to the degree that the opportunities for exploration are shifted dramatically toward a position of many options. Where we before sought outside for clarity, comprehension, and identification, we must now rely on other senses that lie, for the most part, within ourselves.
And then there is the Moon, in which all reflections have been replaced with a poetically charged mirror. In contrast to the Sun whose emanations unify by immersion, and whose power rejects the attempts of the eye to gaze directly into its glory, the Moon’s visual gravity is like sensory magnetism: it unifies the living eyes of the creatures walking beneath it, drawing them all upward to gaze upon the changing silver disc which has fascinated organisms since before time had a name.
And then we sleep, and the paradigm’s inversions continue. Linear time is banished, and even our own identities become peculiarly liquid, as though we were choosing amongst endless possibilities instead of playing out a distinct and distinguishable identity. Where once we looked into the world, many worlds now seem to inquire into us. The myriad beings, so recently known as external, now arise within us as expressions of ourselves…
And somehow, magically, the darkness outside becomes a light within us. Where by day express awareness into the world, by night we receive awareness directed into the world we become. It is astonishing that nothing more than ideas can obscure this divine inversion so completely as to render us almost entirely unaware of it.
Tell me, have you ever seen the Sun, or the Moon in your dream? A rainbow?
What is the source of the light in your dreams?
(*> ~ o ~ . <+)
The Moon
…and then I saw the twins, one bright, one dark. They were in the room of visions. While the bright twin lay prone, facing the visions, the dark twin grew long enough to form an arch above him, starting below the feet, and ending above the head — and then, at last, I began to understand…
If the Sun is the arbiter of certainty’s focus, the Moon is the announcement of mystery’s breadth. The glorious penetrations of the Sun are inverted in the Moon’s quiet invitation to receptivity; its comparative understatement is establishes a context of rest, meditation, and inward reflection.
Life is an expression of just these cycles. Light and darkness, clarity and mystery, warmth and cooling. When the outside moves at speed, the inside caches energy. When the outside is at rest, the inside rejuvenates.
The Moon, in part because of its obvious visual cycles, has been the primary inspiration in human timekeeping until relatively recently. In some surviving cultures, it still is. In fact, in some cultures the Moon’s identity trumps Earth as the ‘Mother of Life’.
The Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) creation stories identify the Moon as the Sun’s wife, with the Earth cast in the role of hogan or lodge. A peculiar feature of this story links the Moon’s monthly disappearance (new moon) with menstruation, a feature unlikely to be entirely unique to the Blackfoot since the terms for month, moon, menses, and menstruation diverge from the same root. Although it is not clear whether human menstruation is synchronized with moon phases (constant exposure to artificial light makes this difficult to ascertain), many cultures metaphy the full moon as related to ovulation and the new moon to menstruation.
Many cultures tracked fertility according to lunar cycles; such that the names of the moons corresponded to fertility cycles in animals and plants that were important in the lives and livelihoods of these peoples. This leads to an embodied perception of biocognitive time, rather than the mechanical perception of intervals without content, context, or meaning.
Eventually purely lunar calendars were replaced with lunisolar calendars, in which an occasional embolismic month was inserted to the 12-moon cycle in order to bring it into synchrony with the solar or seasonal calendar.
Animals and insects are preternaturally aware of phases which human cultures have long had only representational awareness of; but the awareness of season, time, and other features of biocognitive synchrony is an innate part of our animalian and organismal heritage. Were were to shed the representational aspect, this awareness would rapidly return to clear prominence in our bodies, cultures, and minds.
It is a source of wonder that the Moon is precisely the correct size, at the correct distance, to perfectly occlude the Sun during a solar eclipse. While moderns have invented a variety of explanations for the apparently common terror that overtakes some indigenous peoples during these events, the realities have little to do with these excuses, and more to do with a their direct if semi-literal understanding of recursion, feedback, and, most importantly, the common occlusion of the source of flow during certain extreme transitions.
If the day is knowledge, the night is imagination. Like the two rivers that run within us, one flowing outward and the other drawn into the heart; night and day are not merely phenomenon — they are aspects of our own exquisite participation in a universe more miraculous than the sum of human stories.
The cyclic changes of the moon are luminal instantiations of changes happening in our minds and bodies, which our representational cultures have stripped our awareness of, and which they strive to deny us the capacity to believe in or explore.
