The Potala
Lhasa, Tibet
The Tenth Man
What I am is the Absence of my presence.
My presence is a dualistic mechanism of subject-object, of negative-positive, like the escapement of a clock, manifested phenomenally and dominated by a positive I-concept -- the whole purely conceptual, composed of concepts arising as a result of sense-perceptions.
The noumenal absence of my phenomenal presence, which is also the noumenal presence of my phenomenal absence, is what I am, and of every pair of interdependent couterparts it is neither (the one) nor (the other), and the total negation of each and every concept of which phenomena are constituted.
In this phenomenal absence which I am, there is no time, either positive (temporality) or negative (intemporality), for there is no thing therein to be extended or not-extended in space-time. And I am only awareness of NOW.
Being unmanifested as what I am, my Absence knows neither affectivity nor intellectuality, which are manifested by my presence. This Absence is Void, and it has also been called sat-chit-ãnanda.
It is my Absence that is meant when I say 'I Am This I Am'.
(The Tenth Man, Wei Wu Wei, Hong Kong University Press, 1966.)
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