“The Event came after retiring. I became aware of a deepening effect in consciousness that presently acquired or manifested a dominant affective quality. It was a state of utter Satisfaction. But here there enters a strange and almost weird feature. Language, considered as standing in a representative relationship to something other than the terms of the language, ceased to have any validity at this level of consciousness. In a sense, the words and that which they mean are interblended in a kind of identity. Abstract ideas cease to be artificial derivatives from a particularized experience, but are transformed into a sort of universal substantiality. The relative theories of knowledge simply do not apply at this level. So ‘Satisfaction’ and the state of satisfaction possess a substantial and largely inexpressible identity. Further, this ‘Satisfaction’, along with its substantiality, possesses a universal character. It is the value of all possible satisfactions at once and yet like a ‘thick’ substance interpenetrating everywhere. I know how weird this effort at formulation must sound, but unless I abandon the attempt to interpret, I must constrain language to serve a purpose quite outside normal usage.
This state of ‘Satisfaction’ is a kind of integration of all previous values. It is the culminating fulfillment of all desires and thus renders the desire-tension, as such, impossible. One can desire only when there is in some sense a lack, an incompleteness, which needs to be fulfilled, or a sensed goal that remains to be attained. When in every conceivable or felt sense all is attained, desire simply has to drop out. The result is a profound balance in consciousness, a state of thorough repose with no drawing or inclining in any direction. Hence, in the sum total, such a state is passive. Now, while this state is, in one sense, an integration of previous values, it also proved preliminary to a still deeper state. Gradually the ‘Satisfaction’ faded into the background and by insensible gradation became transformed into a state of ‘Indifference’. For while satisfaction carries the fullness of active affective and conative value, indifference is really affective-conative silence. It is the superior terminus of the affective-conative mode of human consciousness. There is another kind of indifference where this mode of consciousness has bogged down into a kind of death. This is to be found in deeply depressed states of human consciousness. The ‘High Indifference’, however, is the superior or opposite pole beyond which motivation and feeling in the familiar human sense cannot reach. But, most emphatically, it is not a state of reduced life or consciousness. On the contrary, it is both life and consciousness of an order of superiority quite beyond imagination. The concepts of relative consciousness simply cannot bound it. In one sense, it is a terminal state, but at the same time, in another sense, it is initial. Everything can be predicated of it so long as the predication is not privative, for in the privative sense nothing can be predicated of it. It is at once rest and action, and the same may be said with respect to all other polar qualities. I know of only one concept which would suggest its noetic value as a whole, and this is the concept of ‘Equilibrium’, yet even this is a concession to the needs of relative thinking. It is both the culmination and beginning of all possibilities.
In contrast with the preceding Recognition, this state is not characterized by an intensive or active feeling of felicity. It could be called blissful only in the sense that there is an absence of all pain in any respect whatsoever. But I felt myself to be on a level of consciousness where there is no need of an active joy. Felicity, together with all other qualities, are part of the blended whole and by the appropriate focusing of individual attention can be isolated from the rest and thus actively realized, if one so desired. But for me there seemed to be no need of such isolation. The consciousness was so utterly whole that it was unnecessary to administer any affective quality to give it a greater richness. I was superior to all affective modes, as such, and thus could command and manifest any of them that I might choose. I could bless with beneficent qualities or impose the negative ones as a curse. Still, the state itself was too thoroughly void of the element of desire for me to feel any reason why I should bless or curse. For within that perfection there is no need for any augmentation or diminution.[...]
As an intimate part of that supernal consciousness, there is a sense of power and authority literally of cosmic proportions. By contrast, the marchings of the Caesars and the conquests of science are but the games of children. For these achievements, which seem so portentous and commanding upon the pages of human history, all inhere in a field of consciousness that in its very roots is subject to that Higher Power and Authority. Before mere cataclysms of nature, if they are on sufficiently large a scale, the resources of our mightiest rulers and of our science stand impotent. Yet those very forces of nature rest dependent upon that transcendent and seeming Void in order that they may have any existence whatsoever. The mystery before birth and after death lies encompassed within it. All of this, all this play of invisible and visible forces seem no more than a dream-drama during a moment’s sleep in the illimitable vastness of Eternity. And so, from out that Eternity speaks the Voice of the never-sleeping Consciousness, and before the commanding Authority and irresistible Power of that Voice, all dreams, though of cosmic proportions, dissolve.[...]
[...] the level of the High Indifference may be regarded as the terminal Value reached by delving into that which, in the relative world, man calls his ‘I’, and yet, equally, the final culmination of all that appears objective. But this objectivity, in the final sense, is simply pure Divinity. So, the sublimated object and the sublimated self are one and the same Reality, and this may be represented by the judgment: “I am the Divinity.”
~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without An Object (A Discussion of the Nature of Transcendental Consciousness)
This state of ‘Satisfaction’ is a kind of integration of all previous values. It is the culminating fulfillment of all desires and thus renders the desire-tension, as such, impossible. One can desire only when there is in some sense a lack, an incompleteness, which needs to be fulfilled, or a sensed goal that remains to be attained. When in every conceivable or felt sense all is attained, desire simply has to drop out. The result is a profound balance in consciousness, a state of thorough repose with no drawing or inclining in any direction. Hence, in the sum total, such a state is passive. Now, while this state is, in one sense, an integration of previous values, it also proved preliminary to a still deeper state. Gradually the ‘Satisfaction’ faded into the background and by insensible gradation became transformed into a state of ‘Indifference’. For while satisfaction carries the fullness of active affective and conative value, indifference is really affective-conative silence. It is the superior terminus of the affective-conative mode of human consciousness. There is another kind of indifference where this mode of consciousness has bogged down into a kind of death. This is to be found in deeply depressed states of human consciousness. The ‘High Indifference’, however, is the superior or opposite pole beyond which motivation and feeling in the familiar human sense cannot reach. But, most emphatically, it is not a state of reduced life or consciousness. On the contrary, it is both life and consciousness of an order of superiority quite beyond imagination. The concepts of relative consciousness simply cannot bound it. In one sense, it is a terminal state, but at the same time, in another sense, it is initial. Everything can be predicated of it so long as the predication is not privative, for in the privative sense nothing can be predicated of it. It is at once rest and action, and the same may be said with respect to all other polar qualities. I know of only one concept which would suggest its noetic value as a whole, and this is the concept of ‘Equilibrium’, yet even this is a concession to the needs of relative thinking. It is both the culmination and beginning of all possibilities.
In contrast with the preceding Recognition, this state is not characterized by an intensive or active feeling of felicity. It could be called blissful only in the sense that there is an absence of all pain in any respect whatsoever. But I felt myself to be on a level of consciousness where there is no need of an active joy. Felicity, together with all other qualities, are part of the blended whole and by the appropriate focusing of individual attention can be isolated from the rest and thus actively realized, if one so desired. But for me there seemed to be no need of such isolation. The consciousness was so utterly whole that it was unnecessary to administer any affective quality to give it a greater richness. I was superior to all affective modes, as such, and thus could command and manifest any of them that I might choose. I could bless with beneficent qualities or impose the negative ones as a curse. Still, the state itself was too thoroughly void of the element of desire for me to feel any reason why I should bless or curse. For within that perfection there is no need for any augmentation or diminution.[...]
As an intimate part of that supernal consciousness, there is a sense of power and authority literally of cosmic proportions. By contrast, the marchings of the Caesars and the conquests of science are but the games of children. For these achievements, which seem so portentous and commanding upon the pages of human history, all inhere in a field of consciousness that in its very roots is subject to that Higher Power and Authority. Before mere cataclysms of nature, if they are on sufficiently large a scale, the resources of our mightiest rulers and of our science stand impotent. Yet those very forces of nature rest dependent upon that transcendent and seeming Void in order that they may have any existence whatsoever. The mystery before birth and after death lies encompassed within it. All of this, all this play of invisible and visible forces seem no more than a dream-drama during a moment’s sleep in the illimitable vastness of Eternity. And so, from out that Eternity speaks the Voice of the never-sleeping Consciousness, and before the commanding Authority and irresistible Power of that Voice, all dreams, though of cosmic proportions, dissolve.[...]
[...] the level of the High Indifference may be regarded as the terminal Value reached by delving into that which, in the relative world, man calls his ‘I’, and yet, equally, the final culmination of all that appears objective. But this objectivity, in the final sense, is simply pure Divinity. So, the sublimated object and the sublimated self are one and the same Reality, and this may be represented by the judgment: “I am the Divinity.”
~ Franklin Merrell-Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without An Object (A Discussion of the Nature of Transcendental Consciousness)
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