Tag: Love

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

Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”: A Rake-Handle/Head Collision Sentence by Sentence

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?
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Have you ever accidentally meditated? The key word here is “accidentally” — as in strolling through a peaceful garden and being suddenly clobbered on the forehead by a rake-handle. Instant karma: Instantaneously encountering the consequences of your own unconscious behavior.

This slapstick experience is a kind of split-second meditation. Action and consequence, mindlessness and its inevitable manifestations, are too instantaneously linked to leave any time for an aggrieved imagination of my “self” to erupt and blame the rake, as mindless thought tends to do.

In the instant of the collision, one either gives up the ghostly illusion of one’s own dignified self and laughs at the idiotic nature of existence, sans “me”, or stays trapped in the skull running in circles in search of an escape from the echoing sounds of one’s own circular running.

You know the experience of the internal voice and its endless chatter.

This is the experience of reading Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable.” Either you are transformed in fits of gut-wrenching laughter by these collisions with your own stupidity, or you will have no idea what I’m talking about and will hate the book and never finish it.

And don’t be fooled by the word “meditation.” Although it’s an accurate description of the experience of reading Beckett’s trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable), it’s also misleading in some of the term’s popular guises. By “meditation” here I don’t mean trying to remain peacefully aloof, or sitting cross-legged until one’s eyes cross in pain, or struggling to not struggle.

I mean something that a typical Subject will never Verbalize. No subject, no verb, no observer, no thing observed, no effort, no expectations of peace, but something that stops the little “me” short and reveals the farce of this me’s incessantly noisy reincarnations as “better angels” — these efforts to escape its own noisy disappointments. By meditation, I mean suddenly coming face to face with this ongoing monologue of self-centered thoughts racing across the skull and tripping over themselves in slapstick futility.

The laughter that erupted from “this reading body” (I couldn’t call it “me” at that point) was like a volcanic explosion that changed the geography of this small life. Every sentence gymnastically tripped over itself in mental slapstick, like a literary Charlie Chaplin, landing with sprained expectations, and then blaming the previous sentences for the faults of the present turn of phrase, ad infinitum, like the head of a dog blaming its tail-end for spinning in circles — thereby multiplying the number of reincarnations — each “me” seeking an escape from the “me” of the immediate past.

It was a revelation of reality. It was the most honest thing I’d ever encountered.

Because what I encountered on the page was exactly what I encountered in my own head, albeit in a less raucous, gritty, sublime, and breathtakingly — delicately — insightful manner of speaking. I couldn’t breathe from laughing. There was no time between each sentence to feel idiotic and self-conscious, only space enough for the giddy relief of surrendering to one’s own reflected stupidity, forgiving myself in the absence of time’s excuses.

It was a meditation no less abrupt and unexpected than a rake handle to the forehead.

Antisemitic Elements in the Modern State of Israel

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My feeling is that nothing is going to change this repetitive history of mass murder, or nation against nation, until the illusions of “who we are” dissolve. Not that identity itself would disappear. But identity ceases to be an illusion when it’s held more lightly, as passing reflections on our behavior. But when they become stuck in idolized forms, illusions multiply.

Rather than constantly relighting these fuses of Us against Them, we need to allow that fuse itself to dissolve in a broader vision than us and them. Because every political or social movement starts from the same rotten assumption – namely, a belief in the reality (not mere fictional reality) of a separate Self (whether national, political, religious or racial self, and so on). It’s this belief that is the fuse. And it’s a delusional belief. We are not who we think we are.

And the dissolution of these illusions of identity would snuff out the various fuses before any of them can lead to war.

But almost everybody finds this level of criticism absurd or far-fetched or unrealistic, or even offensive, and so on. Because people primarily look at nations, tribes and other group entities as if they were real. It’s the psychology underlying this illusion that attracts my interest; not the geopolitical dramas carried out by these fictional entities.

So, I’m going to keep talking about these illusions, without proposing any additional solutions (which are inevitably political or social solutions). Because the solution in this case is the problem. The solution of politics is the problem because it always reinforces the illusion of separate identities; and these solutions are never any better than mere truces.

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Briefly Touching a Third Rail: Footnote 2 to “What Is Self-Knowledge?”

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Now, this is a third rail in society, so let me place my metrical feet carefully here.

I think everyone has a right to experiment and poke and prod themselves and change their genders and do whatever they want to their bodies. Every person is free to experiment in order to learn what is and isn’t possible. It’s nobody else’s business.

But the inquiry into Identity is my business, since I’m a human being in the stanchions of various constricting identities like everyone else. By “identity” I’m not referring to the true nature or substance of you and I. That true nature exists beyond the reach of both conceptual certainty or social constructs, and therefore also beyond the reach of negotiation. I am not a man because I identity with manliness in some culturally defined image, but simply because it’s a description of the body — of its actual forms and functions. Self-identification has nothing to do with the body’s actual gender. Gender identity is the social construct; the body’s actual gender is not a social construct.

Identification is a constructed imagination of a body (and the imagination of a “Self” viewing the body as if from above), which has been given cultural permission to supersede the importance of the actual body. Everywhere in this culture, the 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.

And this 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. The soul was not 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, including the reality of its own biology.

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The Two-Edged Sword of Thought and Action; On the Nature of Humor and Sorrow

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Recently, my wife and I drove past a house way out in the country, where 8 chickens were held in a cage that would be small for one. This was just after learning that the killings in Gaza were continuing under the radar; and Trump had just bombed another 20 fishermen for no reason. And Ms. Good had been murdered.

Our efforts to save the chickens became a surrogate attempt to put an end to all that pain and sorrow. In other words, it was futile. We could do nothing but contemplate a midnight raid, which would have caused the poor, ignorant woman in the shack to lose her mind. Because in some strange way she loved the chickens, or thought she did, and had raised them from eggs, she said. And there was nothing the sheriff or the animal welfare department could do under current laws; and we had no place to bring the chickens even if we stole them.

And after contemplating the possibility of losing my mind over an issue that was so small in comparison to what is happening in the broader world, I had to accept the pain. I had to admit that there is no possibility of separating the pain of life from the love of life. And that we live in a world that must always teeter between hell and heaven. And that we have to find a way to move through this border land without sinking into pits of despair or indulging in a transcendence too high for our tears to reach the earth.

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Time and Timelessness

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Photo by Fritz Jaspers on Pexels.com

[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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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 »

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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Extinction and Responsibility: Why Climate Disaster Might Heal Us Even As it Kills Us

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A Sky View of Earth From Suomi NPP by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

This appeared on Counterpunch.

Alice O’keeffe: “Even if we can’t escape its consequences, it is not too late to escape the mindset that brought us here.”

If climate disaster has left us with no future do we still feel responsible to the earth that outlives us? Or do we say “who cares?”

If we say “who cares?” then our sense of responsibility was never anything more than a moral rule, a business deal of sorts, where we agreed to behave honorably as long as we were allowed to project our egos into future generations. But I think real empathy for a world without us is still possible, and I think it matters in some way that can’t be calculated on a strictly transactional basis.

The possibility of near-term extinction is new, but the underlying dilemma this presents is as old as the Big Bang, or older. Death is death. It comes to the individual as surely as it comes to the species, the planet, and the exploding universe itself. What’s different now is only this onrushing inability to avoid facing this fact. And I think this is a good thing, because it forces a confrontation with the many reductive delusions that have limited our creative participation in the world, which is our responsibility to something more than ourselves. The chief among these limitations has been a strict and too literal image of who we are, an identity that keeps us trapped in a solipsistic circle.

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