Kaleidoscopic Eye
A kaleidoscope provides a mystical sight. Looking through another eye, we see patterns of repeating symmetry in a seemingly random world. We see that everything is a reflection of something else. It is all a reflection on a reflection. Reflecting on reflection itself becomes a portal of mystical revelation.
The kaleidoscopic view is not just a human construction. It is not just an optical device made by human hands. It is a different way of seeing that precedes human invention. It is the dynamic interplay of light reflected through the shifting patterns and structures of matter. The same patterns occur through the compound eye of a dragonfly or the sky reflected on ripples of water. There is kaleidoscopic eye in the night sky as it appears to turn around Polaris. Everything is an illustration of patterns within patterns. The cosmos is constituted by compounding patterns in dynamic interpenetrations of energy and matter.
The human mind is also kaleidoscopic with its capacity to shift between different perspectives. We see a different world with every turn of thought and experience. The world appears radically rearranged with each change in the angle of where we are looking from, what we are looking at and how it is illuminated. The ability to hold multiple perspectives at once is the foundation of integral consciousness.
The kaleidoscope is an illustration of integral consciousness in practice. As the mind shifts between perspectives, Integral consciousness is not what is seen in any given view, in any given image, but the instrument of kaleidoscopic awareness which can shift between multiple views of the world and hold the continuum of awareness between them.
Through the kaleidoscopic eye, we perceive a world across shifting structures of consciousness.* Each turn of the mind and change in stance or direction is a cascade of shifting experiences in dynamic patterns. Perspective alters our perception of reality. What we perceive of the world can be as fluid and dynamic as the world itself is. This is not a purely intellectual practice. What we see from a different angle changes the whole instrument of perception. We are as much transformed by the way we perceive as we are transformed by the perception.
Regardless of where we stand and how we perceive what is happening, we nonetheless abide in and participate with wider patterns. Looking across time and space, we have a kaleidoscopic vision of the shifting landscape. Dynamic patterns are perceived and enacted through the many forms of consciousness which abide within them. Every stimulus has ten thousand responses. Every thought and action is a reflection on a reflection. Every arising moves outward in concentric rings of lived experience. We are ripples within a wider body of consciousness. We are the kaleidoscopic reflections of a living planet.
Emanuele Coccia writes: “What we call consciousness is nothing but this reflection of the Earth upon itself, and every living being is necessarily a consciousness of the world: an image of the world not as anatomy but as mirror. It is not even necessary for it to be perceived as such: every living being simply is nothing but this capacity to reflect the totality of the world in everything it does, to become and to retain within itself the image of the entire planet. We do not need globalization to discover totality: in the heart of every living being there is a perspective on all things.”*
Through colors and shapes and species, in countless expressions, the collective world reflects upon itself through every singular perspective. Consciousness is the mirrored surface through which the worlds beauty is reflected. Every surface is a mirror which reflects a living presence. We are both reflector and reflection. As we are simultaneously perceiver and perception. Every being is a compounding pattern of compounding patterns. We are both inhabitants of the world and elements of its architecture. Every thing we encounter is already illumined through and through in the light of perception.
What we see through the kaleidoscopic eye is neither literal fact nor fiction. It is simultaneously an exact image and a distortion of it. It is the image itself presented in a new arrangement. Seeing through any single perspective, what we perceive is both true and distorted. This is the nature of perceptual filters. The world is usually seen in a fractured way and rarely seen in its wholeness.
The kaleidoscopic eye frees us from the fundamentalism of any single perspective. It also liberates us from the fallacies of hyper literal perception - the belief that accuracy is a flat, objective view of any given phenomenon. We have to look through and beyond the literal view to perceive the extraordinary artistry of the cosmos.
Withdrawing from fixed concepts of what’s real or not real, the world we encounter becomes more spacious and open. We can see it as a living image. It is not wholly literal nor metaphorical nor symbolic. It is not wholly lucid nor latent and unconscious. It is not wholly subjective or objective or interpenetrating. It is all of these simultaneously. It is not a partial view, it is whole and unbroken presence.
Through a dimensional view, we can only see walls and surfaces and reflections. We only see the dispersal of the mind across scattered moments of perception. But the integral mind looks beyond the splintered surface. It sees through unfolding processes across time instead of fixed figures, It looks across space from different angles, and it sees the same phenomena through different structures of consciousness.
The goal is not just to shift perspectives but to hold them all in simultaneous awareness. Looking through many separate views, our whole awareness supersedes them. Seeing into and through them, we encounter a living truth that is the source of all reflections.
*Credits:
Much of this article is a restatement of integral philosophy as presented by Jean Gebser, Jeremy Johnson, Aaron Cheak and others. The literary device of the kaleidoscope is my own. The quote from Emanuele Coccia comes from the book 'Metamorphosis'
Image Title: Kaleidoscopic Eye
Made with: Echinacea disk and petals (Echinacea spp.), Sunflower petals (Helianthus annuus), Thornless Honey Locust leaves (Gleditsia triacanthos), Dogbane Capsules (Apocynum cannabinum), young sumac shoots (Rhus spp.), digital kaleidoscope
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