Solipsism

November 13, 2026November 14, 2026 negativegeography1 Comment

In writing the story “Jackal“, I was finally able to describe the solipsistic trap into which I fell as a 13-year-old. It’s odd that I was unable to ever explain or describe the terror of that predicament until I finally let a “character” who is not me embody it for himself.

I don’t want to make this about a supposedly real “me” and draw all that attention into this false face, this red herring (this personal story.) I don’t want to take this drama of myself too seriously. It’s just a story, one of billions.

I mean, I didn’t suffer more than you. Much less, perhaps. But we’re all in some portion of Hell, as far as I can tell. But my understanding of hell is that it’s a mirageof deceptive thoughts obscuring an inconceivable and (therefore) sacred mystery, which exceeds the goody two shoes moralities of every imaginary heaven.

But any report exposing the delusional landscapes of hell is (from my point of view) helpful to everyone else who is stranded there.

We’re differently the same, I suppose. Not isolated at least. But we embody nuanced vantage points of the same, unified undivided whole. It grants us a creedless faith in what exceeds us. Our own ignorance is a palpable proof, in that sense, of the sacred and profound.

But this somewhat different and somewhat peculiar behavior (writing) is the only way I found to extricate this ganglion of thoughts from this peculiar spot in hell. Or, you could say, the only way to get my head out of my ass was to write. It’s not for everybody. Other people have other methods applicable to other locations in hell. The shape of their own escape from hell is their own requirement.

But that’s why I’m writing about it. I can’t help it. It’s what the slow unfoldment of sanity requires of me.

And, until now, I’ve been hesitant to attempt anything that comes this close to the actual terror itself. When I was 13, I briefly tried to describe the solipsistic predicament to my mother and older siblings. But I could feel them dissolving into distance as I spoke, because their own empathy prevented them from confronting such an unreachable (and ludicrous sounding) pain in someone they cared for.

But it was also partially that I myself withdrew from them, because I could not want anyone (especially them) to feel a horror of that sort. So, all I could feel in trying to reach for help, was a widening cavern in our relationship.

And what good would it do them or me? It would only ruin them too. It was impossible to want anyone to feel such terrorizing isolation. And I couldn’t make sense of it anyways.

But now, I have an incentive to share it more vividly, because the trap is sprung. I got through the terror part of it (like you did, or you probably wouldn’t be reading). And we can see from our different perches that this solipsistic problem — which can be dismissed easily as an absurdly selfish perspective — is also the secret terror underlying the whole human culture, at least as seen from a certain slant of light. But that slant (like all honest slants) provides valid information. This information goes unnoticed in other slants of light (which have their own peculiar channels of information, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum).

This implies that we’re learning to see past the need to compete, because you I and everybody else (when we’re not lying to ourselves) add unique vantage points to the human vantage point as a whole. An honest person (even if only honest at this moment) is inevitably idiosyncratically weird and insightful, as far as I can tell. And whatever they do will carry that stamp of a genuinely authentic and good human being, who is inevitably — helplessly — helpful. That’s all that anything of quality really amounts to, a virtue-spreading action.

Skills are less profound than a genuine human being in action, whatever that happens to be, even if it’s only writing.

After all, this isn’t actually showbusiness. This isn’t about writing. Or making something that others should admire and applaud. You can keep your thumbs to yourself. It’s about facing my own (our own) pretense (from a certain slant), which is my Self as a mere drama, not as something real. Every self-image is unreal in that sense. We’re weirder and more unique than these static, repetitive habitual dramas of ourselves, these surrogates of reality, these strawmen, these avatars, these Egregores, who we mistake for ourselves, these original Bots gone rogue, these false fronts. These identities are confinements of whatever it is we really are.

And this is the very half-insight I half-glimpsed as a kid but couldn’t understand until now. It scared the shit out of me.

Yes, in fact, I am not real just like I feared (and no longer fear). The others I picture (you all, for instance) are also unreal. I’m sorry to break the news. All these beliefs about myself are not the reality of myself, nor of you. There are no ultimate boundaries to our existence that allow real definitions to form. And we merge with one another if thought isn’t imagining itself in isolation. Without that thought we merge. And this means no summaries of us can stand as anything but transient (and therefore useful and helpful) fictions.

Therefore, being “unreal” is freedom from any finality of form, or any known limits, with their dull routines of perception. We exceed these small certainties of self. Our roots are inseparable from the whole mystery of the universe itself.

—

And as we learn to distinguish between a false or virtual “self” and this undefinable and infinite authenticity, we’re also discovering a similar problem in trying to distinguish the limited infinities of AI virtuality from unlimited infinity of reality itself (whatever that may be).

And this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the cultural impacts from a shared solipsism (a universal tendency towards the particular). Culturally expressed solipsism is a corrosive force that doesn’t necessarily lead to social terror (but fascism or any autocracy would be one example of that). More often, it leads to this familiar numbing disinterest in our own survival — a depersonalization and derealization crisis, which severs our trust in reality, and our love for the earth and its creatures, which includes ourselves. From here, it looks like the human mind (the general flow of meaning, its fashions and changes in tacit beliefs) is suffering a mad indifference to its own survival. And I feel this is a direct symptom of a “shared solipsism.”

I’m not trying to be an activist, exactly, and I don’t think my Messianic delusion is the problem. I think you and I are merely beginning to emerge from a virus of the mind (or perhaps we’re finally being forced to grow up). So, we’re starting to recognize the symptoms of his virus in one another, or at least in the broader culture. And it’s a natural empathetic necessity that arises when we realize we’re not separate. We can’t help offering one another whatever assistance we can provide.

Not assistance, exactly. But maybe it’s like a mating call or something. We start bellering essays and songs and poems and gardens and carpentry and good neighborliness and whatnot into the world, into circulation. Every virus-free moment of human life is a healing frequency, is a call of unity (not for unity, because it already exists). Or, it’s a reminder. A siren call reminding us to wake up from our illusions of self-importance and rejoin the dance.

The honest life plays in the sandbox of this material world; flinging futile offerings or unrequited love letters (controlled follies, as Castaneda might say) to a world emerging from its coccon.

Jackal

August 14, 2026November 13, 2026 negativegeography3 Comments

[Part of a longer story titled “Jump“].

O Partha (Arjuna), happy are the Kshatriyas who gain such a battle that comes of its own accord, opening for them the doors to heaven.) — Chapter 2, Verse 32, Bhagavad Gita

He slept poorly and awoke early in anticipation of the mission that night. Then he threw up several times. It was a familiar dread, pre-jump jitters. Not just performance anxiety, or the fear of death, nor the heavy regret of knowing he placed himself in this extreme, and insane predicament voluntarily, nor the envy he feels at breakfast, seeing the carefree jocularity of the ground crew, and the meteorologists, who would never directly enter battle, let alone fly to the roof of the atmosphere itself, and leap into almost pure, frozen space, a half-assed astronaut, a momentary falling spacewalker, until the double-bag static line finishes unfolding, and holds him in a tug-of-war between the canopy pulling up, and the heavy load of his equipment, pulling down.

And then of course, what follows.

But something else was weighing him down now, and had been for quite some time, slowing his every step, as if he were sinking in sand. And it was preventing the boost of adrenaline he’d soon need.

A few hours prior to rigging up, he was hanging out with his “stick” (his paratrooper team) and they were ribbing each other and shooting the shit. Their last moments of relaxation.

But he could never banter very well. He sat on the floor with his back against a door-jam, enjoying the mild grinding pain of the spine against the edge of the jam.

This was his first serious combat jump, a HAHO deep into enemy territory to take out a relay post, and then bushwack back to safe ground, in what’s called an overland exfiltration. In about an hour, they’d start the elaborate procedures and checks and rechecks that took up the better part of 3 hours, prior and during the flight, which was going to be a long one.

Then they’d ride the canopy for a long way this time, about 30 miles, to a drop zone (DZ) in a narrow clearing in the fairly dense coastal forests and then make their way to their objective.

And only then would the real work begin.

Jump

August 13, 2026October 23, 2026 negativegeography5 Comments

For Walter Cybulski, exceptional poet and humorist bar none

[The Introduction will make this story a little clearer, maybe]

His Father’s Circus

1950s gas station with circus act, spectators, mechanics, and classic cars

As a very young boy, his father ran a gas station. He was a mechanic and always carried a gigantic wrench, that was nearly 3 feet long and twice as heavy.

And when he wasn’t working on cars or trucks or busses or tanks, he would swing his wrench, and throw it high in the air and catch it, like a heavy metal drum major. And people would drive long distances just to have him fill up their tanks with gas, so they could watch him perform. And he would do somersaults out to the tanks and backflips all the way back to his office. And when he wasn’t working on cars or tanks or trucks, and the lines at the gas tanks had thinned, he’d finally close shop for the day and wander into the bar across the street and ham it up with his friends.

And the small boy would tag along, at first attached to his mother’s bosom, then to her hand, and finally alone, behind his dad, just large enough to be hoisted on the bar stool by a rough hand, and then given a little boost, and finally able to climb the bar stool by himself and drink coca-cola dribbled over huge tankards of ice, chewing the ice, absent-mindedly, while his father laughed and whistled and wagered fortunes on how many pushups he could do in an hour, or whether he could withstand a sledge hammer to his stomach.

Once, a dancing bear happened to be in the bar, and challenged his father to an arm-wrestling match, and the bear won two out of three, but never came back to challenge anyone again.

When the boy was 8 years old, he quit school to become a soda jerk, and got a job next door to his father’s garage. And over the years, as the garage business grew, all the other businesses in town grew by proximity, and profits skyrocketed all around. You could hear the sonic boom for miles.

Time and Timelessness

March 20, 2025December 3, 2025 negativegeography5 Comments

[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.

The Whitewashed Corridors: An Allegory

January 24, 2025October 23, 2026 negativegeographyLeave a comment

“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.

Lucid Waking

February 11, 2024November 3, 2024 negativegeography2 Comments

Dreaming youth by Ernst Barlach by Los Angeles County Museum of Art is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

People talk about lucid dreaming. Just once I’d like to be lucid when I’m awake.

I arose from blessed oblivion again this morning. It’s a shared oblivion that encompasses the origins of the universe itself. We share our beds with galaxies and comets in utero. The oblivion at the core of sleep isn’t the oblivion of lifelessness, nor is it a rejection of earthly existence, but a reunion with the primordial egg of undeceived Being at the heart of earthly life.

Every night we get the chance to recapitulate the origins of the world and awaken with a Big and creative Bang, which is not will, which is not choice, but a spontaneous eruption of something unprecedented in who we are. After all, we can’t choose what exceeds our comprehension.

I love the insistently hinting dreams of early morning. The timeless oblivion of the depths crashing on the shores of waking life, bending the scraps of memory so that they seem like messages in a bottle, warning me of the sleepwalking illusions of “being awake”.

There is a moment in the passage between fluid sleep and the seemingly solid ground of waking when you are neither. In that suspended space (an eternal space that only appears fleeting when you leave) you realize that the dreams of night were not real after all. And when you turn that same cleansed look towards shore, and peer through all the repetitive dramas of waking life, you see that they are no more solid than the dreams of night.Read More »

… And Now I don’t

July 9, 2021April 10, 2026 negativegeography3 Comments

I made a big and interesting mistake in trying to ascertain who you are in the essay “I See You Now.” Even the title sounded threatening. But this is what Negative Geography was built to handle — a place where I can stare back at my own footprints in the subtle mud of language and decipher where I go wrong.

And some of these mistakes reveal ancient confusions, ancient in that they are not entirely personal mistakes, but self-injurious reactions to transgenerational traumas as Mate tends to describe it, stretching back through human history beyond reckoning.

From one angle, this is the kind of mistake that our parents wisely warned us against — staring too long into the image reflected in the water, because we’ll drown in confusion.

However, I’m no longer susceptible to this fear. I think it’s because I already drowned a long time ago and now I’m beginning to crawl back to the shore like some kind of primordial shape, picture a mud puppy if you need to.

The first surface mistake was in devaluing the deeper personal and impersonal relationships I have with many of you. You aren’t some abstract conception of an Other; you are not merely mined for your value and then discarded, which is what I described. But the image I hold of the person listening is mysterious to me still, as if I’m picturing a mind that is still forming; but one that is partially revealing itself in many of you; and sometimes even in brief exchanges with strangers on a bus; with everyone who carries that charge of honesty that can change a life; and all this feeds the image of a wider mind that is listening, a real mind, in flesh and blood. And I made the mistake of accidentally discounting the fact that this potential is visible in real people reading, and is not abstract and disembodied.

So this led to the the second surface mistake — a failure to acknowledge how important these ongoing dialogues with you are in everything I write.

The underlying error, however, is solipsism. But solipsism is not merely a fancy way of describing a self-centered outlook.

I See You Now

July 7, 2021June 14, 2026 negativegeography5 Comments

Would you believe me if I said I don’t want to call attention to myself? It would seem impossible because I’m placing these private and somewhat personally unnerving words out there on Facebook, for one thing.

But personal attention makes me sick. And yet I couldn’t find you until I placed these things in some kind of public thoroughfare. I didn’t care if it was just a park bench. Someplace where you might happen along, allowing me to imagine you.

A park bench is almost perfect, but not quite believable enough, because I’m sure these words would be pecked to pieces by a passing pigeon or thrown up on by a drunk, before anyone real like you happened along.

And so I tried a publication like Counterpunch, fairly broad and relatively easy to access. But periodicals have a far too particular outlook, are too demanding in what they want from me. I’m not inclined to work at molding myself to anyone’s demands. I need a thoroughfare that is utterly open-ended and will not lead to any kind of fame, which would destroy my solitude or anonymity. But the thoroughfare still needs to be larger than a park bench in order to allow me to convincingly imagine you as a passing stranger with a mind as large as God’s.

Why this Shit Matters: Notes on the Last Few Essays

September 18, 2019April 10, 2026 negativegeography9 Comments

Goofy as it might sound, I’ve been trying to do something for 40 years that is almost impossible. I’ve been grinding my teeth on this thing against all good advice, pouring all my energy into what probably looks like an obscure and meaningless (or maybe just confused and confusing) thing.

The Buddhists say that the truth can’t be spoken; that words are a distraction from what is real, because language is a virtual reality that convinces us that it’s not virtual. So language is essentially a delusion, which can never help us encounter what is real. Reality is found off the page, not on it.

And the same goes for thought and feeling and imagery. It’s all a kind of curtain that pretends to be showing something beyond the curtain, where in fact nothing at all is found. We make up everything.

Look, the Buddha knew his shit. And I’m not disputing what the Buddhists say above. In fact, it was my starting point, not as an idea or belief (because I’d never heard of Buddhism), but as a terror. If for some reason you suddenly learn that you’re trapped behind a film of language, feeling, thought and imagery and that everything you experience is imaginary, then there is no “getting off the page” into reality. It’s like being stuck in a hall of mirrors. It’s not a choice.Read More »

Negative Geography

Probing the limitations of thought and language

Tag: Illusion