(esoteric / exoteric 11)

             If what we have said thus far is correct, the skin based ‘reaction’ of our exemplary unicellular creature in fact involves the potency of the whole of the subsequent sensory (and volitional) evolution. In other words, that skin is an Eye. It of course lacks any aspect of the reflexive (apart from the ‘reaction’ itself), and therefore fails of our ultimate definition of the Eye, in which at least a primitive ‘extraneous’ sense of the witness is present. But in the wholeness of its ‘reactive’ response – in the very simultaneity of ‘act’ and ‘perception’, it expresses the ultimate Eye potency: how the image making reversal of sight becomes the paradigm for awareness, both as the separable witness and as the value following focus which, when we turn back to investigate it, proves to be the ‘body of the Eye’.
             Which is to say that the separation inherent in the reflex, which we have thus far dealt with more or less objectively or in the abstract, is not only thoroughly intimate in the instance of awareness as the pure act of immediacy, it has an inertial ‘tail’ that directs the Eye as focus, and this inertial tail not only validates the ‘something’ ‘outside’ immediacy that leads immediacy to value, it is the body of consciousness itself.
             Now this body of consciousness itself bears some sameness with our ‘perceived’ body, if we largely exclude any ‘image’ we have of the body as seen in the mirror. That is, the body of the Eye is the inwardly experienced body.
             At moments, we automatically see the body as ‘other’; and, at other moments, we automatically experience the body as ‘self’, a moment when the body virtually ‘disappears’ into the Eye or witnessing sense.
             In other words, the Eye as pure witness and the Eye as the ‘tail’ or body sense are both intimate and the radical expression of the separation at the root of our present reflexive mode of experience.

             In the intellectual world, the tail disappears when the Eye is fully intimate with its object. In other words, the focus of the Eye as ‘pure witness’ can nevertheless bring the body into identity within the given range of awareness. This, of course, is simply a fancy way of defining focus itself, since awareness is necessarily identity – solipsism requires it; and therefore that the volitional nature, as a consequence of the sequence of reversals which constitute human evolution, is both the standing identity of the given visual world and the moving and concentrating identity of the focus that moves within the frame of that given visual world.
             But, of course, it is not simply in the intellectual world that the Eye can disappear into the tail. We can identify with the world in its immediacy, moments in which the driven nature of focus disappears into the whole, and separateness ceases, that emotional sense of the other which also disappears when the intellectual finds intimacy.

             Here then, we have a basic definition of the two selves in terms of the ‘organic’ structure of consciousness. But, of course, we have three principles. For, while the Eye is the pure witness, it is also not only the ‘tail’ of ‘focus’, it is also the ‘tail’ of the body as the world, the solipsistic correlation or identity of awareness and world through the generic instrumentality of the body.
             Evolution is the test of this sameness in terms of ‘substance’. But the ongoing test of this sameness is experience itself, with its ‘extraneous’ and undeniable experience of closure or validity.
             The problem for ‘science’ at this point, of course, is that such experience necessarily involves and cannot be divested from the uniqueness of ‘self’. The given fact that awakens this intimate understanding can generally be rendered into a common or shared knowledge, but by the very act becomes abstract principle, thus losing the intimate character of its first appearance, the moment when it awakened an individual to the workings of the ‘self’.

             But what concerns us here is the ‘tail’, since this is both the ‘instrument’ of focus, apart from the shared paradigm wholeness of the ‘empty’ Eye of the ‘pure’ witness and the embracing field of experience in which Eye, body and world are merged.
             Traditionally, esoterically, this tail has been identified with the spine, since the spine, not only in an abstract neural way, but as the core feeling of the body, concenters the record of the various evolutionary shifts or reversals which it in fact ‘records’ in the feelings as well as in corresponding physiological structures.