On Rising

On Rising

Every up agrees on one thing.

I

Which way is up?

Point, and you will point without thinking: overhead, every time. Keep your finger there. We’ll come back to it.

Imagine a person so awake to every Jay (every moment someone feels something and leans, toward or away) 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. Follow each ray back out through a 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 every angle at once, no west surrendered to win the east.¹

Physics keeps a word for a state that is all its possibilities until something resolves it to one: superposition.² To be fully aligned might be to dwell in the superposition the rest of us give up the instant we take a vantage.³

II

And here is the astonishment: all color gathered is white.⁴ 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. My band and everyone else’s, stacked together, make what any of us calls the world. 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, every color still itself inside it.⁵

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 with open eyes, 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.⁶

But what cannot be read can still be felt: sit long enough with the mind gone still and the veiled rules come through like a floor in a dark room, known by standing on it.⁷ One of the last unexplained kindnesses of the universe.

IV

Rise this way and you do not leave; you turn, at last, and 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.⁸ 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. This series calls the wake a Trace, intent moving on through time, and it carries the rings you regret as faithfully as the rest. 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.⁹ A man in Missouri and a woman in New Zealand both lift their eyes “up” toward the stars, and their gazes part across the dark, more than a hundred degrees apart; it would take someone out on the southern Indian Ocean to look exactly opposite him.¹⁰ 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. It is the same direction your finger is still pointing. There is no ceiling overhead; on the largest scale the cosmos keeps no up at all.¹¹ Yet every up agrees on the one thing: away from the pull. So to ascend toward something greater than ourselves is to move, from wherever you stand, against the weight that gathers you and presses you flat.¹²

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 weight, 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. The Hua-yen Buddhists pictured such a gathering as Indra’s net: a jewel at each knot, every jewel reflecting every other, reflections included, without end. Hua-yen used it for the way each thing contains and is contained by all the rest. Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism.

2. 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. 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.

3. Aligned here means facing, not seeing. In the framework’s functional, set out in Johnson, On Explaining, each perspective enters the gathering with two things only, how strongly it holds its state and which way it faces, its Intent. Nothing in that arithmetic counts viewing angles, so the vantages in this image can differ as widely as the world allows while what is held in common is the facing. Stated arithmetically, the white light is the limit in which every perspective faces the same way: each one’s angle to the gathering falls to zero, and the gathering reaches the ceiling its definition allows, a size of exactly one, so that every perspective reads one. A perspective alone reads one as well, but that reading is empty; alone, it has nothing to agree with but itself. Whether anything ever approaches the full state is a separate question, and this essay does not claim it does.

4. Newton, “New Theory about Light and Colors.” Newton’s prisms split sunlight into its colors, and the colors, gathered again, made white; white, he concluded, is compound, not simple.

5. Spinoza held that the mind can conceive things sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity, a view from no single time. Spinoza, Ethics, part 5, propositions 29–31. The Dzogchen teachings name something near it rigpa: an awareness that is not achieved but recognized, clear from the beginning. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Wonders of the Natural Mind.

6. Plato’s prisoner, led up out of the cave, is dazzled by the sun and has to be brought to it by stages, shadows and reflections first. Plato, Republic, book 7. Plato’s point is that the eyes need time; reading the veil as a mercy is the author’s.

7. Near the close of “On Beauty,” Plotinus tells whoever wants the beauty beyond the body to shut the eyes and wake another way of seeing, one everyone has and few use. Plotinus, Enneads, I.6; the wording here is a paraphrase. Reading that inward seeing as the stillness of meditation, which the contemplative traditions keep teaching, is mine.

8. Johnson, On Facing, develops the Trace: what a life sets moving in time whichever way it is turned, good in the measure that the life was aligned. Jung’s instinct rhymes here: wholeness as the coincidentia oppositorum, the union of every opposite within a single Self, a phrase Nicholas of Cusa had made famous long before. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis.

9. “Up” has no absolute meaning; it is defined locally as the direction opposed to the gravitational pull toward a body’s center of mass.

10. Kansas City (about 39.1° N, 94.6° W) and Wellington (about 41.3° S, 174.8° E) lie about 115 degrees apart around the Earth’s center, so their local verticals differ by that much. Kansas City’s antipode is in the southern Indian Ocean, near 39.1° S, 85.4° E; Wellington’s is in central Spain.

11. The cosmological principle holds that the universe is, on the largest scales, homogeneous and isotropic, the same at every place and in every direction, privileging no center and no “up.” Peebles, Principles of Physical Cosmology. Sagan said we are a way for the cosmos to know itself; on this essay’s reading, the gathered light, followed home, is light looking back at light. Sagan, Druyan, and Soter, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.”

12. The Paradiso closes on that kind of ascent: at the top of heaven the pilgrim’s desire and will are turned, like a wheel moved evenly, by “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,” the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Dante, Paradise, canto 33.

Bibliography

Cook, Francis H. Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

Dante Alighieri. Paradise. Translated by Mark Musa. Vol. 3 of The Divine Comedy. Penguin, 1986.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Explaining. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21154523.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Facing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20603463.

Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 14. Princeton University Press, 1970.

Newton, Isaac. “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton … Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 6, no. 80 (1672). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1671.0072.

Peebles, P. J. E. Principles of Physical Cosmology. Princeton University Press, 1993.

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Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Abridged by John Dillon. Penguin, 1991.

Sagan, Carl, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, writers. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 1, “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean.” PBS, 1980.

Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics. In The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, edited and translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton University Press, 1985.

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