A Quick Theory of Hell

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What if there are areas of Hell where the inhabitants think they are happy? At least, at first.

There, the inhabitants merely suffer perpetual stasis. But this stasis becomes so unbearable after a while that many end up seeking the easy change of a worsening situation to relieve them of the monotony.

And then they get tired of making things harder and join one of the various Societies for the Betterment of Hell. But almost nobody shows up after a while, because the meetings are too monotonous, too many parliamentarian procedures, and nothing ever improves.

So, Hell’s society bounces between two rather mild extremes – the temporary excitements of a worsening self-made crisis and an exhausted return to static monotony.

On a personal level, nobody suffers too much. The nick-nack shelf hangs almost perfectly balanced. Things only roll off now and then. Or maybe you have a low-grade migraine that comes and goes every day. And aspirins are in short supply. (Dope too; the marijuana fields keep getting attacked by new fungi). But there’s also no great suffering at any given moment. (After all, it’s only the “thought” of never-ending migraines that begins to wear you down).

Or, perhaps upon entering hell, you’re given a perpetual membership in Hulu or Amazon Prime or Youtube. Seems nice at first.

But then the prospect of spending the next 5 million years watching re-runs of The Office trends badly. (Also, notice that the “Prospect” of 5 million years occurs to someone as an immediate thought. That’s all it takes to lose heart; you don’t have to wait 5 million years. Hell is an immediate thought).

Also, what makes this hell really hellish is that everyone is free to leave. All they have to do is change their habits. But it’s too much trouble to leave hell; there’s always another youtube short to watch.

Hell is a voluntary surrender facility for the fatally indifferent.

Again, it’s not that hell actually lasts forever. It’s the immediate thought that you’re trapped into remaining in this cornucopia of trivia simply because you’re too indifferent to EVER leave, which is hell.

What eventually drives most of the inhabitants to lower and darker levels of Hell (making room for newcomers) is that immediate but unbearable knowledge of their own freedom to leave. The skies remain too blue here, the trees too green, the flight of the vulture still too serene, to ever let them forget this otherwise passing thought.

Time and Timelessness

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[This appeared in the May issue of Pari Perspectives]


6am: Long Shadows

The morning shadows are a memory of night. They seem to long for the dissipating darkness. Reluctantly, they retreat, until they are cowering under our feet by midday; and then by late afternoon, leaning once more towards the returning dark.

How can a timeless “now” squeeze between these ceaseless shadows?

The clock, too, is ceaseless. There is no space on the clock face to mark a “now”.

Maybe the clock is only a map of a timeless territory.

Or, perhaps the clock is a spinning prism through which the mystery of time and timelessness can be seen in different slants of light and shadow.

But even a full circumference of 24 hours will not resolve this mystery. Because everywhere I look, I see only the limitations of human perception, not the limitations of reality itself. So, I can’t “know” time, only these slanted perceptions.

Perhaps time can’t be known because there’s no replication possible. Look, this golden-hued sunrise doesn’t hold quite the same golden hue as yesterday’s. Every morning, the clouds change, branches and leaves have fallen, breaking the light a little differently. And my sensitivities change also.

So far, the earth has experienced about 1,658,195,000,000 mornings, and every one of them was different. Maybe the clock never completes a perfect circle, but spirals beyond measure.

Maybe the techno-futurists are wrong, and we’ll never travel to a previous time, or live forever, because something always dies, no matter what. We will always leave someone behind, or some part of us. Or, we’d return knowing what we didn’t then; which would make it something new; not the past at all.

Our desire to escape the anxieties of time leads us unwittingly towards an inanimate repetition of a deathless world; a perfectly circular and repetitive mechanism; an escape from the spiral of renewal, which requires dying to the past and future, as Krishnamurti pointed out so clearly.

Look, already, the early morning hints of spring have vanished under a wintry sky. I have never known a morning like this.

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The Whitewashed Corridors: An Allegory

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“Architecture Building” by Anonymous/ CC0 1.0

Remember when I found you in that long, white hallway? There were no obvious lights anywhere, but somehow everything seemed brightly lit, without any shadows.

The majority of the crowd in the hall was drifting past us in small groups, linked arm-in-arm — probably families and friends, or communities, or economic associations, moving at a fairly steady clip. A few loners were running and bumping into people. Lots of “excuse me’s” and “hey, look out’s” could be heard.

I asked you to stand to the side, because that woman to the left just about ran you over, remember? Of course, I was joking.

I introduced myself as a janitor. Not really part of the crowd. But I’d been working in that complex for as long as I could remember.

Perhaps I’m a spirit, because nobody seemed to notice me. I pushed my invisible broom up and down the various corridors, without paying much attention to the hubbub or what this place was all about.

But after what seemed like several thousand years of sweeping floors, I got a little bored. And I got a little curious about the nature of this complex or whatever it is. You were the only ghost like me I’d ever met. You seemed familiar to me. I saw you on the margins of the page, not quite sure why you were here. I told you to join the club. I said, I think it’s time for me to lay down my broom and start exploring this place a little more. I asked you to join me.

So, we picked out somebody at random to see where he was going. Let’s not bother with describing him, other than to say, he walked alone (which was somewhat rare), early middle-aged, somewhat stooped and nervous, constantly checking his watch. Oh, and he was carrying a backpack that looked fairly heavy. That should suffice, we’re not building a character study. We only wanted to find out where everyone was heading.

Now and then we’d pass someone moving in the opposite direction, almost always mumbling feverishly to themselves. Everyone would try to get out of their way. They had bad hair, which seemed to make people nervous.

It was a non-descript hallway, as I said, except for signs that appeared at every turn, or T, or four corners. The first one we passed said, “just around the corner!” But usually, the signs were more specific.

For instance, sometimes the crowd would move slower. Especially if we came to a juncture. The first one I recall was a four corners – left, right or straight. Our man stopped to consider his options.

The sign to the left read, “This way to Profit”, and a portion of the crowd in business attire — using their briefcases as shields to push through the traffic jam — went scampering off in that direction, talking into their cell phones nonstop. 

But we couldn’t see anything different in that direction. It looked like the same white, featureless hall. And we saw another sign at the end of the corridor, but it wasn’t possible to make it out clearly.

To the right, the sign said, “This way to Life Everlasting!” And a portion of the crowd started heading in that direction, walking arm in arm with their children. And others walked alone with their heads bent in solemn procession. And yet that corridor also looked exactly the same as the others. And the man we were following went straight. We thought, maybe we should have picked somebody more interesting. But that wasn’t the point of the trip.

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Neither Materialism Nor Idealism: The End of Dichotomy and the Evolution of Humanity

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Downland, Liddington by Andrew Smith is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

 

 Questioner (Q): Is there a material or immaterial basis to everything?

Imaginary Philosopher: I wouldn’t ask that. It creates a false dichotomy and presumes too much.


Q: You don’t think it’s an important question?

IP: I think we urgently need to question the small visions driving us towards a cliff. Materialism is a blindingly short-sighted vision that degrades our relationship to earthly life. But I wouldn’t focus on an answer.

Q: Why not?

IP:  Any answer to this question is a form of reductive materialism itself, creating dichotomy and conflict. Positive certainty is destructive. We end up thinking we’re absolutely right about something, and those who hold an opposing view become enemies.

Opposing views needn’t be in conflict. Materialism and Immaterialism are only what we see when facing different directions. It’s similar to microscopic  and macroscopic visions. The microscope and the telescope don’t argue with each other. Each has limitations, which are partially completed by the other.


Q: Are you saying it’s both?

IP: Yes, that, and more, they’re all limited.


Q: What are the limitations of both views?

IP: Imagine the absurdity of visiting a doctor because your face is stuck in a frown. The materialistic doctor examines the face, and concludes that the cause of the frozen frown is a combination of changed patterns in blood flow, muscular tension, and temperature, recommending muscle relaxants. Such a doctor would dismiss “sadness” as a cause, because the existence of an immaterial state of mind would be pure conjecture. There’s no material proof of a mind that feels sad.

This may seem absurd, but this is how a typical scientist approaches the study of the material world. We measure the physical attributes of the world and don’t even bother to wonder if these complex systems of order indicate an immaterial intelligence of the earth itself. Materialism limits our vision.

But if we adhere to an opposing viewpoint – that only mind or spirit is real – then the body and the earth itself fade in importance, appearing merely as discardable clothing obscuring the spirit, or as mere illusions, or inanimate shells.

Western culture seems to be vacillating between these two extremes. An abstract Platonism that led to a Sky God divorced from earthly life, becoming a puritanical hatred of the body, which are all different forms of idealism.

And then this strange scientific materialism, which also degrades matter and mines the earth as if it were inanimate.

So, both viewpoints are limited.

Earthly life has been demeaned by both extremes, because we lost a “vision” of sacred matter — a materiality unsevered from the immaterial.

Q: Isn’t this vision of “sacred matter” another competing belief?

IP: Yes, it could degrade into another material fetish of a belief. Do we necessarily move from a belief in materialism or a belief in some form of immaterialism to a belief in “sacred matter?” Many believe that we can only move from one positive belief to another, that it’s impossible to relate intelligently to the world without a symbolic structure that guides us. But this belief is also limiting.

Is it possible to not merely question each belief from a new position of belief, but to question the whole category of “belief”, so that one is not merely thinking about previous forms of thought, but relating to every belief with unvested interest, or ultimate uncertainty?  

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Charlie: Reflections on Death, Beauty and Love

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“I think I could turn and live awhile with the animals… they are
so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them sometimes half the day long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition….
… … not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth” (Whitman, Leaves of Grass)

charlie deep in garden

Love may be eternal, as the saying goes, but it’s also never more than a series of fleeting encounters. What we hold too long and too close becomes blurry, dissolves into fetish. The objects of our love slip our embraces sooner or later.

Or as the saying goes, what we love, we let go. Living things are constantly going. The animal body moves, it breathes, pumps, circulates and leaves only a trace that fades and disperses.

Even the atoms of our bodies are constantly being replaced.

The person we love is a dispersing form. Or, rather, a shape discernable in the gathering and dispersing of material.

I’m watching suspended motes of dust slowly circulating through the room. If this dust formed an intelligent pattern in passing, if the shape of a person could be discerned in the circulating motes, would this suggest a presence beyond the dust itself? Would we intuit the impression of a soul, because something more than matter alone is at work here? Something that gathers and disperses, an immaterial attractor revealed in the passing shape of matter?

But to attribute this “soul” to something utterly non-material and separate from the body does great harm to our understanding of earthly life. It devalues the biology as some “mere” candy wrapper that can be thrown away, almost disparagingly.

The beauty of these paradoxes lies in the cracks that suggest something more. For there is something soulful about an animal body, about the earth itself. And we are too quick to explain it all rationally, materially and mechanically, or leap into a transcendence that betrays our earthly mother.

Rather than inventing some compromise view, I prefer the suspended question, which sees the limits of both and offers no final answer, only a direction of learning. A vision of life that is more than material, and more than non-material. Nothing so black and white. Nor the compromise of gray.  Somehow an embrace of both — a soul that shines as a body, a body that burns with soul.  Read More »

Facing the Trump in All of Us: First Steps in a Ceremony of Healing

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I’m writing the persons who will replace us. At present we can only see the magnetic flash of someone in utero; that potential, which is more communal than personal. Some fetus audacious enough to see through its own charades.

I’m writing because this is the performance of a new way of being, this is how it begins to take shape. It’s you and I facing our shame, not I alone.

We don’t give birth to a new being by ourselves. This is an alchemical experiment, a shamanic dance. The eyes dance the words, and this ceremony creates someone capable of seeing the Self as a construct of self-deception. A way of being rises from the ashes of who we thought we were.

Imagine the courage it takes to not fool yourself.

Even the imagination of this person can’t be sustained without deception. The effort to do so creates a positive ideal, which is a desire for transcendence, and that desire is opposed to being seen as a fool. It doesn’t want to see how it fools itself.  It hides from reality and never acknowledges that it does so.

This is the origins of our political situation also. The system is running from reality as fast as it can, right into the arms of a narcistic dictator.Read More »

The Rebellion Starts Here

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Time to summarize where the series on freedom has gone up till now.

The only concern of these essays is the restoration of the earth’s health.

But how can something as pathetic as an essay contribute to the healing of the earth? The same way any other action performed whole-heartedly contributes, the same way any white blood cell encountering a virus contributes to the healing of the whole population: By realizing and metabolizing the world’s poisons as they circulate within this holograph of the whole, called me. By being an example of healing, by facing my diseased self honestly, allowing the old patterns of identification to die, as they should have died thousands of years ago, before the disease suppurated.

Honesty is the painful act of healing. It’s also the most rebellious act one can undertake in a deceitful world.

This isn’t about learning to play the violin while the world burns. None of these essays are about personal advancement or personal adjustments to a world in its death throes. Those concerns make me sick. I mean “sick” as an accurate metaphor, because the world’s sickness is rooted in a frame of mind that is selfish and short-sighted. We are heading towards extinction from too much personal concern.

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Toxoplasma Mindii: Ideas As Zombie Parasites

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Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need for true ideas. There aren’t any” (Nisargadatta)

Thought tends to run us (ala David Bohm), but it’s such a convincing hallucination that we’re the ones choosing what we think. But usually, we’re just repeating fragments of ideas that have come to us from others, from one-sided, patriotically-distorted historical education, Youtube, echoing chat groups, books, unconscious habits of response in parents and teachers that presume certain “facts” about life (absorbing these philosophies unconsciously). Etc.

How are we supposed to have an idea of our own in this rubble-strewn flood of information? How can we pick and choose what is right or wrong when our basis of decision making also comes from this chaotic flood?

Ironically, we’re not lucid until our thoughts are recognized as a cultural dream into which we were born. We awaken by realizing we’re asleep.

The irony is that real individuality only happens when I realize that thought has carried me away, that beliefs ran me from one blind conviction to another, like cordyceps (the zombie-ant fungus).

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Why “Everything Is Fiction” is Both True and False

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woman in white knitted sweater

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I can imagine that many of the claims I tend to make would annoy historians, among others.

I tend to say that knowledge isn’t a matter of fact or fiction, but of honest or dishonest fiction.

And I tend to say that a conclusion puts an end to learning.

Historians, reporters and police detectives (among others), however, are often diligent in sorting fact FROM fiction, and wouldn’t take kindly to any smudging of those distinctions. They also tend to work towards a conclusive determination of events. They might argue that the question, “did this happen or not?” demands a conclusive answer in order to learn anything substantial. So right away, both of my claims will seem outlandish from their perspectives.

I myself would argue that we need to retain a distinction between fact and fiction if the context (such as law) is premised on this distinction. We have to understand the definitions and frameworks of any foreign language. But I would argue that these linguistic distinctions are themselves fictional inventions. “Fact or fiction” ‘is a fictional way of sorting events.

After all, a fact (under microscopic examination) is by itself a meaningless dot of data in an infinite sea of data points. Facts only begin to make sense when they are strung together in a narrative. In other words, we can’t understand any fact without understanding the context, which is the story that defines the fact. I can’t think of a single fact that isn’t part of an explanatory narrative, like beads on a string.

Creativity is inseparable from the collection of facts. Read More »