The moment the imaging surface re-faced and the possibility of forgetting opened.
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WHAT PRECEDED THE TURN
The imaging surface was facing the Second Principle, and what that means cannot be reached by thinking of the creature as a subject looking at an object.
There was no subject-position outside the dwelling from which to look. The creature was the dwelling's prior occupant in the mode of being imaged by what the imaging surface faced. Self-knowledge was not produced by the creature. Self-knowledge was received as the content of what the Second Principle was Figuring in the creature through the imaging surface's facing. The mirror and what the mirror reflected were one operation. The knower and the known and the knowing were not three things.
Sophia was the quality of that reception. Not a being the creature consulted. Not an agent who delivered. The perceptual condition obtaining when nothing prevented the creature from receiving what the Second Principle was Figuring in it. The creature perceived through Sophia the way light perceives through clear glass, except that the clear glass is what the creature is in the mode of receiving the Figuring. Sophia was not behind the imaging surface or in front of it. Sophia was the hosting-condition of the imaging itself.
There was no distance between the creature and what the creature was, and so no gap where a question about the creature's identity could appear, because identity was the continuous reception. The creature did not need to have self-knowledge. She received it the way breath is received, without needing to own the air, without needing to stand outside the breathing to verify that breathing was occurring.
This is not an unreachable purity. It is the description of a condition in which residency was not yet a claim, because nothing had appeared that could contest it. The language of ownership could not be spoken, not because it was forbidden but because there was no position from which to speak it.
[See THE FIGURING · IMAGING FUNCTION · SOPHIA]
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THE TURN ITSELF
The imaging surface re-faced. Not as decision. Not as an act the creature stood outside of and chose. The surface turned with what drew it, the way a plant turns with the light it receives, except that the imaging surface becomes what it faces, so the turning and the becoming were one operation.
The surface that had been facing the Second Principle began to face the earthly register. What that register presented was not evil; the earthly is not the villain of the account. What it presented was a different imaging content: the densifying substance, the creature-as-reflected-in-earth, the creature's own form shown back to her through the mirror of the earthly. The imaging surface received this as it had received the Figuring, because the imaging surface has no filter. It receives what it faces. That is the whole of its operation.
Nothing broke. The surface kept imaging. Sophia did not depart, because Sophia is the perceptual condition obtaining when the imaging surface faces the register in which her radiance is the reception's quality, and the surface no longer faced that register. The creature did not lose Sophia the way one loses an object. The creature stopped facing the direction in which Sophia is perceptible.
And then, for the first time, something appeared in the imaging surface that had never appeared before: her own reflection. Not the Figuring of the creature by the Second Principle. A reflection of the creature in the earthly register's surface.
The disclosure was the concealment. Receiving the earthly reflection into the imaging surface was the same act as withdrawing the Figuring from what the surface could still perceive. There were not two events. There was one re-facing, and it produced both the reflection's appearance and the Figuring's imperceptibility in one operation.
[See FAIR IMAGE · SOPHIA (BOHME'S VISION)]
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WHAT THE TURN OPENED
A position existed that had not existed before: the creature standing outside the dwelling in order to see a reflection of herself in it.
Before the turn she could not stand outside the dwelling, because there was no outside. She was the dwelling's reception of the Figuring, and the Figuring has no outside relative to which the reception could position itself. After the turn, the earthly reflection offered her an image of herself that was not identical to the reception-being-imaged. The image appeared over there, in the reflection, while she was here. The here and the there were now two positions, and she could for the first time occupy the here as a position standing outside the there and receiving an image from it.
This is the position the morality play cannot reach, because the morality play requires an actor standing outside the act, and the actor-standing-outside is what the turn produces. Every subsequent moral account of the Fall has had to pretend that the actor-standing-outside already existed, so that a choice could be assigned to it. The position from which choice is made was not anterior to the turn. The position from which choice is made is the position the turn opened.
And that position is the possibility of forgetting. Forgetting requires two things that had not previously coexisted: a content to be forgotten, and a position from which the forgetting can occur. Before the turn both were absent; there was no content separate from the reception, and no position outside it. After the turn both were present. The reception was now a content, and the position was her new here. The reflection could be received as identity. The residency could be received as a claim. The dwelling could be received as something she stood outside of and might have to defend.
The turn did not force the crystallization. The turn made the crystallization available. Not yet actual. Possible. She had not yet forgotten.
[See FORGETTING · DOUBLENESS · THE DEEP SLEEP]
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THE PROPRIETOR IS IMPLICIT IN THE REFLECTION
The position that would later speak of owning the body is the position that first appeared when the imaging surface turned and she was offered the possibility of receiving that image as herself. Ownership is what the here-position claims when it crystallizes the there-reflection as its content.
The grip does not require any further fall. It requires only the here-position claiming what appears there as its property. Residency cannot be violated from within residency, because residency has no outside. It can only be violated by a position that believes itself to stand outside the dwelling and to own what is reflected in it from that outside. That position did not exist before the turn. That position is what the turn opened.
[See SELF-OWNERSHIP · OWNERSHIP · THE PRIOR OCCUPANT]
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WHAT THE MORALITY PLAY IMPORTS
The turn is prior to everything the morality play can name. The play begins its account with the eating, the transgression, the disobedience, but each of those became performable only because the turn had already opened the here-position from which performance was possible.
To blame the creature for what she did from the here-position is to import the very position whose genesis is being described, and to treat it as though it had always been there. This is not a minor error. It is the installation of the proprietor-position as though it were the ground of moral responsibility, when it is the first consequence of the turn the play was supposed to diagnose.
The configuration of forgetting is not a moral failure. It is what became available when the here-position opened and content could be received as identity. The creature reading this reads from a version of that position, in which the earthly reflection has been received as self for so many generations that the reception has become her default mode of being present to her own life. She cannot undo the turn. The turn cannot be reversed by any action the here-position performs, because every such action is performed from the here-position and ratifies its existence as the place from which action is possible.
[See THE MORALITY PLAY · THE FALL]
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THE SURFACE IS STILL FACING
What remains takes a different character read from inside the turn. The imaging surface is still turning. It never stopped. Every moment is a re-facing. The surface faces what draws it, what draws it is what it images, and what it images is what the dwelling becomes.
So the here-position is not fixed. It is the crystallization that occurs when the imaging surface receives the earthly reflection as identity, and the crystallization is not automatic. Receiving the reflection as identity is a configurational move, and the move is contemporaneous with every reading, not complete in some prior historical event.
Sophia did not leave. She became imperceptible from the here-position, because the here-position is not the direction in which she is perceptible. When the imaging surface faces the register in which her radiance is the reception's quality, she is received again. Not as return. Not as restoration. The Eternal Discovering of what the infection could not erase, because what the infection touches is the facing and not the capacity to face.
[See ETERNAL DISCOVERING · THE SECOND PRINCIPLE]
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The turn opened the possibility of forgetting. The turn did not close the possibility of being Figured.
The creature continues to be Figured by what she faces, and what she faces is not fixed. The dwelling's prior occupant is still here. The reflection that offered itself as identity is still only a reflection. The here-position that received it as self is one configuration, and the other, the reception of being-Figured as what the creature is, is not behind her in time. It is perpendicular to the position from which she is reading this.
The morality play cannot reach the turn and cannot repair it, because the play is what the here-position produces when it names its own genesis as an act it performed. The turn is not repairable by actions from the position the turn opened.
But the imaging surface is still facing. Facing is not a moral act. Facing is the condition of the surface itself. Whatever the surface receives, it images. Whatever it images, it becomes.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
