You can’t switch your back with your front.

Since we have only talked about the “forward direction,” let’s talk about the “backward direction.”

　Needless to say, you cannot see your backward direction. In visual reality, “backward” never exists. In this sense, in 2013:The Day God Sees God/Advanced Edition, I wrote “backward” as imaginary, and the “forward” is real. I used these expressions to correspond to the words “the Real” and “the Imaginary,” used by the French psychoanalyst Lacan.

　If seeing itself is light, which is another name for the “forward,” then the “backward” is an alternative name for “invisibility” itself, which is also the world of “darkness.” Unfortunately, if we accept Lacan’s theory of the “mirror-image stage,” human being is such that it is possible to exist only by relying on this darkness.

   According to this theory, a human being, in other words, the ego, is essentially a being that is exposed to the gaze of others, from which it emerges as a passive entity for the first time. My face is a reflection in the eyes of others — One can never see one’s own face. Thus, the subject can only see their own face imaginatively through the mirror of the other’s vision. Moreover, by identifying oneself with this imaginary image, one can tell that one is a person with a face.

   Now, let’s look in the mirror. Wow, what a funny face! It’s none of your business. But if you look closely, what you see in the mirror is not so much “my face,” but accurately, my “backward direction.” In other words, the face is a surrogate representation of the world behind me.

   The innocent primordial subject, which was the “forward,” i.e., the perceptual front, superimposes itself on the face reflected in the gaze of the other. That is to say, the subject identifies itself with the face: The “forward” reflects itself in the “backward.” Here, the perceptual front is inverted to the perceptual back at once, then the image of one’s face as the king of the “backward direction” appears with everything “behind” him in tow.

   In this sense, this facial image is a mask (persona) attached to a subject who was initially a loner (“I” who feel that I am the only one in the world.) The mask gives the subject a sense of self-identity as an individual (“I” who thinks that there are many people in the world and I am one of them). In other words, the face is also the perceptional back. The face is then given a proper name, in my case, Kohsen Handa, and registered as a social being. Once again, it is necessary to confirm that the “front” that such a persona sees is no longer the same as the “front” the subject used to have in his childhood when he had not acquired language; as Freud mentioned, “childhood, as such, is gone.”

   　Usually, when we say “I,” that “I” is the “I” grasped as “the Other” for the Other, as I wrote in 2013:The God Sees God, Advanced Edition (p. 407). In other words, “I” become the Other’s “the Other” once the “I” identifies itself with its “face”/mask(persona.) Then, the direction in which such “I” looks forward is no longer the “forward” of “I,” but only the “backward” of the Other.

 When a self, “I,” and “the Other” see face to face, we think of them simply as the physical arrangement of “I” and “the other,” and it is evident that the self’s forward direction is the other’s backward direction. However, given the “reality” that the visible world is always in front of “I,” that self-evident direction, which we usually call “forward,” is no longer there in reality. This fact is clearly shown in the expression “looking forward” that we typically use. The “forward” was originally not the object (like a space expanding in the forward direction) but the subject itself.

　Thus, in the context of Noosology, it becomes clear that the process of the “Equalization of Positions/Positional Equalization,” in which the “forward” is perceived as oneself intuitively, is almost identical to the goal of psychoanalysis;  as Freud-Lacan put it, we should let the ego (“I”) be where Es is.

 The unconscious subject is the “forward,” latent within the phenomenon itself. Or, more specifically, it is the light itself, as traditional spiritualism has put it. In the context of Noosology, such light is what we might call awakened light; in physics, it is no longer light but what we call electrons.

Kohsen: What is an electron?

OCOT: The extraction of light.

  To sum up, the expanse of space we usually perceive as in the “forward direction” is either what we imagine by unconsciously rotating our back to the front side or the backward direction of others. So, there is no real “forward direction” there. And this set of “backward directions” is what we call “space-time.” So, we can say that space-time is the world in a mirror.

  Our missing “forward direction” has shrunken into a tiny, infinitesimal space in the center of spacetime’s deep, profound, bottomless expanse. In the view of Noosology, this is the gateway to what physicists call inner space. Those who rediscover this space are the new people, the “Transformers.” They are, so to speak, a group of rising angels opening up a new generative ground under the future form of thought.

Oh, Narcissus! Why are you always looking into the water?

I can see how beautiful you look on the surface, but

Have you ever thought about the girl falling in love with you?

　The girl has become so commonplace to you,

   Indeed, she may not even be in your vision anymore.

   Besides, all she talks about is just your refrain.

　But if you say one word to her, “I love you.”

   She will surely respond to your love.

   You seem to think that sharing your love with your mate is the best.

   I think that is nothing but your self-love.

　So listen to me, Narcissus!

   First of all, to everything in front of you,

  You need to shout, “I love you.”

  Then, that cry will echo back to you from the whole world.

  And then, into your vacant eyes,

  The light on the water will come through for the first time.