I am This and That and This ...: The "tat twam asi"
So let me continue with my reflections undeterred by the noise of the False elites, knowing well that I cannot expect more than these from them and having also experienced something worse in the hands of others especially the religious fanatics of all shades for whom metaphysical reflections are monkey tricks, useless mental acrobatics. But in the History of Metaphysics this is NOT new. The early Alwars and Nayanmars were Pey's and Buuthams ( ghosts and gobblings). Perhaps I am also one in the eyes of the naive and the false elites. So let it be. Nothing is lost by this.
I exist therefore BEING is.
This is a fundamental achievement of my own, an accomplishment through a massive disconstructive effort, an act whereby I have extricated myself from the purely physical and natural and allowed the metaphysical and the supernatural to open up itself in the horizon of my understanding. And with it, I notice now, my understanding as to what EXISTENCE is,also changes , and changes for the better.
The undiferentiated naive notion of existence becomes differentiated into TWO basic types: Being-only-with-the -World (BWW) and Being-only-with -BEING (BWB). My existence can be purely physical with purely materialistic concerns and which I disallow, as a crass dialectic materialist or the rationalist of the recent Dravidian variety or the ancient Carvakas of a kind, anything that smells nonphysical, anything beyond the reaches of the five senses; or it can be purely metaphysical where, I, like a Advaita Vedanti, would consider the physical and natural world a dream-reality, somehow there and about which I cannot speak anything, anirvacana, and somehow there through a mayasakthi, a power that escapes my comprehension.
But I notice that I am BOTH, I am, as Thirumular said long ago "Cat-acat Anma" a thinking being capable of BOTH. I notice that I background or foreground alternatively in my understanding these possibilities to be. When I push BWW to the background then, only then, I foreground BWB. And I shuttle between these two, unable to be fully in one of these but always BWB pulling me unto itself as if a magnet, the Kaantap Pasaasam of Meykandar. There is a strange fascination for BWB within me and I succumb to it even when the world calls me crazy.
And now I look at this state of Being of myself and the fact that now I have gained a more differentiated understanding of EXISTENCE. I have been saying that all these have become realities because of my own disconstructive efforts. But how then I disconstruct in such a way that I gain an understanding of existence that is true and more differentiated?
I could disconstruct only because in my vision there is a THAT that I want to be, fuse with the THAT so that it ceases to dangle in my mental horizon providing me a goal, calling unto itself and inviting me to be that. And with this I notice that right from the beginning my understanding has been PROJECTIVE, in the Heidegerian sense, future oriented with the three ektases of time or temporality - the future and hence the present and hence the past. There are thousands and thousands of these 'thats ' and "thises" that infect my understanding and configure me as one restless and always trying to be this or that, accomplish this and that. Thus my understanding has been structured by Tat Twan Asi, Thou art That. It is a result of such 'thats' in my understanding that I can be disconstructive at all.
Understanding is projective and here I agree with Heidegger but I find that I have to part company with him when he says that the Da-Sein moves from itself to itself by itself. For if the dynamics of my growth in understanding were to be this sort, I would understand only the Da-Sein (whatever it is ) and NOT the presence of BEING. My understanding MOVES but moves in the direction of BEING, I am projective only because I am PULLED out of my closedness , delimitedness , atomicity etc by BEING. And this I realise and formulate it in terms of the makavaakkiyam "tat twam asi", perhaps in a sense quite different from the Upanisadic sense but somehow akin to that.
And when I reflect further I notice that I am TEMPORAL when my state of Being is of the sort "tat twam asi" and this temporality is INTENTIONAL-TEMPORALITY (IT), the KuRippuk kaalam of Tolkaapiyar and different from the PHYSICAL-TEMPORALITY (PT) of the astronomers. And furthermore I notice that I am purely in IT when I exist as BWB and purely in PT when I exist in BWW and hence because of my inherent duality, cat-acat anma nature of myself I am both IT and PT , a being oscillating between these two states of Being.
But because BWW can be discontructed and made to recede to the background but NOT BWB, I also learn that IT is more fundamental and that it is only because I am IT that I am PT. I cannot measure out TIME using the regular motions of the planets or the immensely regular photonic expulsions of the subatomic particles unless I am already in IT. I am in essence INTENTIONAL, my understanding is configured by Tat Twam Asi and hence something founded by throwing me into IT.
My existence is founded by being thrown to be in TIME in the forms IT and PT in which IT in more fundamental and which cannot be disconstructed as can PT be. There is something peculiar and fundamental about IT and the INTENSIONALITY that underlies it.
But does that mean I cannot disconstruct from IT also? That I cannot free myself from INTENTIONALITY as a fabrique of my understanding?
Now understanding that is temporal in both these senses is acattu, as the Saivas are fond of saying, it is non-absolute in the sense that it can be displaced, sublated and backgrounded i.e disconstructed. This means my fundamental intentional way of BEING can also be discontructed.
At that point what happens to Tat Twam Asi? Does it still hold?
We shall attend to this next.
ULLAGANAR
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