Month: September 2026

Short Notes to Clear the Attic, Volume 4

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  • This is a self-inquiry, not a lecture, although I attempt to organize what I am discovering so that you can understand what is otherwise – without this form-finding work – an interior chaos. I share this so that you and I will know we’re not alone. We are fellow prisoners, cutting free our chained minds.
  • We don’t trust our children to unfold as they will. The society wants consistent shapes that can serve as cogs in the inorganic machine. We are trained to serve the machine, not vice versa.
  • Education at its best teaches us self-knowledge, while education at its worst teaches us who we are.
  • Instead of focusing solely on building technologies to save us from disease, couldn’t we have primarily focused on altering our poisoned way of living so that disease was less common?
  • I hear in my own brain (and from what I derive from others’ brains) something similar to government propaganda in the way it defends and justifies itself by referencing selectively edited memories (or fake news), in order to preserve the illusion of a stable and presidential “me” who does no wrong.
  • I need an image of myself. I have to be aware of whether or not my behavior is suited to the moment. And this naturally inspires the brain to summarize how I’m behaving (or other people are behaving) in some short-hand form. But these images perform coherently only when they remain provisional mirrors of behavior – lighting up along the periphery of attention as proprioceptive reflections and refractions, which keep the organism tethered to some portion of reality. Even Buddha had a self-image of that sort.
  • The “small” self (or “me” sensation) is an estimation of how “I” look in someone else’s eyes. Other people serve mainly as mirrors for perceiving this self. This self can’t exist if it’s not imagined from the perspective of an Other.
  • The “I” is merely a rehearsal of how others should see me. It’s chained to others’ opinions. So, this “I” is always a social construct, and is not “who we really are.” We always exceed our own expectations if given half a chance.
  • In focusing too much on trying to unfold a new identity, all we end up doing is shifting from one combination of socially imposed definitions to another, and then calling that shift from the old prison to the new prison, freedom.
  • Where I expect to find a real character within (or within another person), I find only a stream of language describing one.
  • We’d like the other people in our social web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves. Our own entangled stability depends on it.
  • This sense of “self” is not a soul but only the body’s imaginations of itself as if from the outside. It is a secular conception of soul, minus the traditional soul’s connection to a nested hierarchy.
  • Everywhere in this culture, the small Self and its waking dreams have been given permission to supersede the reality of earthly life (biology and planet). It’s a general permission slip to discount reality in favor of a pretense of soul.
  • A “soul” was not originally conceived as the atomic essence of a separate self, but as an idiosyncratic expression of a universal being that can’t be identified in any positive sense, except through metaphor and myth. This humbling sense of a soul is lost when it’s converted into a separate Self, who doesn’t have to answer to anything but its own imagination.
  • This capacity to imagine ourselves outside our bodies is less real than the body, because imagination is only a derivation of the body and is in no position to tell the body who or what it is.
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Concluding Note on “Future Determining Past”

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The entrapment implied in “the past constantly determining the future” is broken by realizing that the so-called future (this new Now) can even more freely and open-endedly determine (or utterly abolish) the past and all its pains and sorrows.

Take war, for instance (please). It’s nothing but a delusional chain of cause and effect (aggression and counter-aggression), each claiming the other started the chain.

But a chain of events has no real beginning or end, because it starts and stops in the present imagination. We can always imagine a new cause. But what we haven’t tried to do very often is stop re-imagining an outdated and deadly past. That’s because we’re afraid of the quiet absence of our dramas (and our Selves) more than war and misery itself.

In other words, a chain of events is based on the belief that the past causes the future — some ill deed by another person or group “forces us” to act in retaliation. And this retaliatory act justifies the righteousness and vengefulness of the ones retaliated upon, and vice-versa, ad infinitum. Therefore, we chain ourselves to the past and then measure our progress by how much effort we put into pulling on the chain.

But if we understand that “the future determines the past”, then we see that what we do now (in the so-called “present”) forms the chain (or breaks the chain). The past has nothing to do with it, because the past and future don’t really exist except in our imagination of them in the “present”. So, every retaliation is in fact the originating aggression.

And if we wanted to break the chain of aggression, we can only do it now, by refusing to do the bidding of the past and walking away from the chains of aggression. But we don’t want to change the past, because it preserves the mirror enemy which gives us our illusion of identity. So “the future determines the past” is a very under-used human potential for immediate and drastic change.

And this applies even to the smaller, mind-forged chains of our personal history and self-images. Whatever we did in the past that makes us feel compelled or trapped into being a certain kind of person or perceiving ourselves as a victim or noble sufferer, or wretch, or mundane same old, same old, it is the past that is “causing” us to be this way. And at every single mundane moment of the day and night, we pick up those chains from the past and reattach them to ourselves and then yank in misery.

We want to believe that only the past can determine the future, because it gives us an excuse to wallow in a familiar old Self and keep the empty spaciousness of life itself — the infinite freedom — as far away as possible.

All of it is a dream world reasserting itself over and over again without cause, because it’s all happening Now.

The solution to human misery has always been close at hand. But we reject it simply because the past is a comforting illusion to those who are afraid of the emptiness and silence and peace of not being anybody in particular — losing all that history of misery we’ve come to cherish. This rejection of that loss is suicide, but it’s not polite to mention reality among fellow sleepwalkers. They toss and turn violently in their sleep whenever you mention it.

A Homemade Double-Slit Experiment, Or, How About We All Do Something Utterly Unimaginable (and Perhaps Uncalled for) and Collectively Jump Free from Our Selves (Which is a Title Almost as Long as the Essay Itself)?

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The next sentence took 40 hears to write, but casual readers may only find it long-winded and incomprehensible (even this very “I” itself may feel this way after all is said and done): The human brain’s eye can perform its own double-slit experiment, as the undifferentiated light of a lively and unlocatable universal intelligence hits the receiver of the brain, causing it to quiver and hum in resonance, and produce the reflected light of awareness, which shines out through these two holes in the head, landing on this white page as small particles of “me” consciousness (each sense of “me” a separate thought or projection or dream), each of which define themselves by contrast to all the other dots of “me”; while simultaneously landing on the page as a continuous wave of identity, (yet another thought , projection or dream), but this one forming a narrative line of an imaginary “I” which connects as many of the imaginary dots of “me” as possible, so that this “I” appears to speak as if it were gazing at itself from a third person’s perch, as if it were a real soul, and not merely a virtual reality.

In this culture, the human voice is obliged to speak as if it were real. It has to claim this wavelike “I” as if it were real. Therefore, I become the center of this little world and all these little “me’s” orbit the “I” as different qualities of itself. And in this way, a philosophy of life has been formed, which nobody recognizes as a philosophy because they think it is only reality itself.

What if one wanted to cut through this crapola and speak as a real human being?

Well, the first step would be to recognize the fictional nature of oneself and not be bothered by it. It would mean not feeling lost or frightened by the immensity of our own emptiness, the bottomless pit of oneself and others. It would mean recognizing the waves and particles of “oneself” as a play of the universe itself. Not that one can identify with the universe and call oneself God. That would be another dotty illusion of a wavey gravy hallucination. But merely come to terms with the truer reality of not being able to pin down a gosh darn thing and finding a sense of humor in all this. Free to play in these particles and waves like a dolphin. Free, also, to be “someone” for a moment — anyone, which is the gift of empathy. Or even free to play a role now and then, but only to the extent that they are practical and circumstantial necessities, not confining definitions. And otherwise relaxing into the sustained and expansive mystery of our surroundings. And finding it all downright miraculous, astonishing, infinitely inviting, creative and beautiful. And stop hallucinating a hellhole and living out this preposterous nightmare of personal and cultural drama.

To stick with the theme of “jumping“, what if we jumped free even from ourselves? Nothing would befuddle the demons of the world more than a human rebellion of this sort at this time and place. They’d fade into nothingness themselves.

If anything, maybe we ARE that nothingness. Let’s stop trying to be someone. We’re emptiness itself. (That’s a negative enough definition to leave us open-ended). Emptiness is good. It’s our domain, not the domain of demons. Demons live in confined spaces. That’s not who we are, that’s only who they fooled us into being.

I go into this far more deeply and soberly in the essay “What Is Self-Knowledge” (one of my best)

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Post-Script: Found this snippet from Tilopa’s “Mahamudra Teaching to Naropa” – Kagyu Lineage:

Although space has been designated empty, in reality it is inexpressible. Although the nature of mind is called clear light, it’s every description is baseless verbal fiction. The mind’s original nature is like space — it pervades and embraces all things