On Rising

On Rising

Every up agrees on the one thing — away from the pull.

I

Imagine a person so wholly in tune with their jays that the world no longer arrives one angle at a time.

I am not that person — not yet, and perhaps not in this life. But I think I have felt the edge of it: the way you can sense a room is larger than the slice of it your eyes are holding.

We see the way a lens sees. Light falls in, and a single vantage is paid for with the loss of every other. To look east is to turn your back on west; to be here is to forfeit there. Ordinary sight is a kind of debt — each image bought with the foreclosure of all the images we did not take.

Now run the light backward. Trace every ray back out through every human eye — past the lens, the wet cornea, the held breath — until the rays that left a million faces meet again in the open air above the world. Gather them. What returns is not a scene but a totality: every angle at once, no west surrendered to win the east.

Physics keeps a word for a state that is all its possibilities until something resolves it to one — superposition.[1] To be fully aligned might be to dwell in the superposition the rest of us give up the instant we take a vantage.[2]

II

And here is the quiet astonishment: all color gathered is white. The spectrum is only what white light becomes once it is broken — dispersed through the prism of a single life into one band, one bias, one beloved and partial hue. Each of us is a color. I have spent a good part of a life trying to learn which band is mine — and suspecting, on the clearer days, that my one color was never meant to be mistaken for the whole of the light. The one who rises sees the white that was holding our colors together all along — not a brighter view, but the view.[3]

III

Behind the scientific rules that bind us, the ones insisting you cannot stand in two places or see every side at once, stand the other rules, the metaphysical ones — the ones that keep us safe. These do not so much bind us as hold us. We are not permitted to read them, and that mercy may be the point: a truth left veiled because to see it bare would be to stop being the creature it was protecting. One of the last unexplained kindnesses of the universe.

IV

To rise this way is not to leave. It is, at last, to see your own wake. The aligned one watches the ripples leave their hands — every intent a stone let fall into time, every act widening outward in rings that do not stop at the edge of a life.[4] I think about my own wake more than I used to: the rings I set going without meaning to, and the ones I would call back if the water would let me. We make them now, blind, the way a swimmer cannot see the far shore their motion already reaches. Alignment is only the gift of turning to look back along the wave and reading what your intent has been writing the whole time. Timeless in design: the rings were always traveling. You were merely the place they began.

V

And the direction of all this — up — is the most honest illusion we keep. Up is whatever points away from the mass that holds you down.[5] A man in Missouri and a woman in New Zealand both lift their eyes "up" toward the stars, and their gazes part in opposite directions across the dark. I am the man in Missouri, and I have stood in that yard and felt how certain "up" is — how nearly impossible it is to believe it is only a direction away from the dirt beneath me. There is no ceiling overhead; on the largest scale the cosmos keeps no up at all.[6] Yet every up agrees on the one thing — away from the pull. So to ascend toward something greater than ourselves is not to travel a fixed bearing into the sky. It is to move, from wherever you stand, against the weight that gathers you and presses you flat.

I feel that weight most days. Rising, for me, has never been an arrival so much as a direction I keep choosing — again and again, against my own pull. Up is not a place. It is a relationship: the refusal of one's own gravity, repeated in every direction at once — which, from far enough away, looks like nothing so much as a single light leaving a single world, rising.

Notes

1. In quantum mechanics a system may be described as a superposition of basis states, and a measurement returns a single outcome with probabilities given by the Born rule. Register note: the use here is frankly metaphorical — a picture of perception, not a claim about physics — and one point of physics is worth keeping straight even so. "Measurement" means interaction with an apparatus or an environment, not the presence of a conscious observer; the reading on which awareness does the resolving is one contested position among several, alongside Everettian many-worlds (on which nothing resolves at all), Bohmian mechanics, objective-collapse theories such as GRW, and the relational and QBist readings. Physics has not settled the question. Nothing in this essay turns on it being settled.

2. The framework later gives this image an exact seat. In the functional set out in On Explaining (Johnson, 2026), the limit in which every perspective faces the same way is the one where all relative angles fall to zero and the gathering reaches the ceiling its definition allows — the white light, stated arithmetically. Whether anything ever approaches that state is a separate question, and this essay does not claim it does.

3. Cf. Spinoza, who held that the mind can perceive things sub specie aeternitatis — "under the aspect of eternity" — a view from no single time or place (Ethics, Pt. V, props. 29–31). The Dzogchen traditions name something near to it as rigpa: a primordial awareness not achieved but recognized, in which clarity was always already the case.

4. The figure of aligned beings leaving legible ripples in time belongs to the jays framework set out in On Facing. Jung's instinct rhymes here: wholeness as the coincidentia oppositorum, the reconciliation of every opposite within a single Self (Mysterium Coniunctionis, Collected Works vol. 14).

5. "Up" has no absolute meaning; it is defined locally as the direction opposed to the gravitational pull toward a body's center of mass.

6. The cosmological principle holds that the universe is, on the largest scales, homogeneous and isotropic — the same in every direction, privileging no center and no "up." As Sagan put it, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself; the gathered light, traced home, returns to where it began.

References

Cook, F. H. (1977). Hua-yen Buddhism: The jewel net of Indra. Pennsylvania State University Press.

Dante Alighieri. (1984). Paradiso (M. Musa, Trans.). Penguin.

Jung, C. G. (1970). Mysterium coniunctionis (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.; Collected Works Vol. 14). Princeton University Press.

Newton, I. (1704). Opticks: Or, a treatise of the reflexions, refractions, inflexions and colours of light. Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford.

Peebles, P. J. E. (1993). Principles of physical cosmology. Princeton University Press.

Plato. (1997). Republic (G. M. A. Grube & C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). In J. M. Cooper (Ed.), Plato: Complete works (pp. 971–1223). Hackett.

Plotinus. (1991). The Enneads (S. MacKenna, Trans.). Penguin.

Sagan, C. (1980). Cosmos. Random House.

Spinoza, B. (1985). Ethics. In The collected works of Spinoza (Vol. 1; E. Curley, Ed. & Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1677)

Wangyal, T. (2000). Wonders of the natural mind: The essence of Dzogchen in the native Bon tradition of Tibet. Snow Lion.

Weinberg, S. (1972). Gravitation and cosmology: Principles and applications of the general theory of relativity. Wiley.

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