This passage from Voegelin’s Anamnesis sparked the insight I diagram as an asterisk.

In the illuminatory dimensions of past and future, one becomes aware not of empty spaces but of the structures of a finite process between birth and death. The experience of consciousness is the experience of a process — the only process which we know “from within.” Because of this its property, the process of consciousness becomes the model of the process as such, the only experiential model to serve as the orientation point of the conceptual apparatus through which we must also grasp the processes that transcend consciousness. The conflict between the finiteness of the model of experience and the “infinite” character of other processes results in a number of fundamental problems. (The term “infinite” indicates already by its negativity that along with it we enter on an area transcending experience. To speak of a process as infinite is tantamount to saying that we have no experience of it “as a whole.”) One of the most interesting of these problems is that of the antinomies of infinity in Kant’s sense. We can subject the finite process to certain derivative transformations, the so-called “idealizations,” which conduce to such concepts as the infinite series or the infinite regress. When such “idealizations” are related to finite series, there result the paradoxes of set theory; when they are related to such processes as the causal nexus, there result Kant’s antinomies. The causal series cannot begin in time because we have no experience of a beginning “in time”; more precisely, one could say that because we have no experience whatsoever of a time in which something might begin — for the only time of which we do have experience is the inner experience of the illuminated dimension of consciousness, the process that drops away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness.

Two elaborations: 1) We have more “illuminated dimensions of consciousness that drop away, at both ends, into inexperienceable darkness” than just time. In my asterisk, I added two other dimensions.

2) I also another analogy to illumination and darkness. We may not see objects in darkness, but we do see the darkness that prevents us from seeing. In my own experience, sight and blindness is a better analogue for our experiences of finitude and infinity, because blindness conceals not only what is concealed, but the concealment itself. With blindness, we can fail to see what we look at, because when nothing is there, nothing is also missing. If we do the blind spot experiment, wherever falls in our blind spot simply dis-appears — becomes visually nothing — without any tell-tale something blotting it out — there is no visual “nothing” to see. When nothing is there, no thing is missing, as far as we can tell.

We have to wonder — or rather, it is good to wonder — that if we can’t even tell the difference between a blind spot and a seen spot, what exactly is going on in our field of vision, which seems so continuous to us? And if we extend sight to perception, and perception to consciousness, and ask the same question — the question of what happens in in the nothingness of existence? — things get weird.

When we sit in meditation, for instance, we learn how this happens constantly at all times even in our own concentrated awareness. You could say that meditation is an existential blindspot test. We cannot see it directly, and we never have to see it at all if we do not want to (for instance if we wish to imagine ourselves to be self-omniscient) but if we allow our perplexities to bloom we will see ample signs that our consciousness is as sporadic and permeated with nothingness as our visual field. I think, therefore I am? The corollary: I don’t think when I am not, in the gaps that permeate my existence.

Crap. I’m out of time. There’s new stuff here, so I’m going to go ahead and post this.