Going On into Nothing
Words, empty words, will not save you
With all the myriad karma-fate that produces the variety of human personalities, opinions, preferences and delusions… regardless of what seems so fractured and diverse, we can see that human beings, at the core of their psychophysiology, are the same.
Yinyang, the oscillatory dynamic process produces the 5 elements (along with the 12 Earthly Branches and Ten Heavenly stems). The 5 Elements is mirrored in the organ system of human beings and expresses itself in the 5 senses. Yinyang also produces thoughts (yang) and feelings (yin). These 7 capacities (5 senses, thoughts and feelings), dictate the underlying premise of our behaviors. They lead us via Pain, Fear and Desire/Hunger, through the landscapes of Violence, Aggression and Ambition.
Along the way we become addicted, dopamine-chasing lunatics hellbent on utopian immortality, consuming and depleting every resource we discover until the well runs dry. When the well runs dry, we reckon with our debts - karmic, assymetrical, “unfair”, yet the pressure this produces leads to very few possible outcomes.
We become further enraged and fixated on dominance and hoarding. We become “demonic” - insensitive, unresponsive, with blunted empathy. The perfect creature to thrive in the economic system of hetero-patriarchal capitalism. Demons. The ones that see humanity as something to be conquered and transcended. Some of their favorite sayings are “Survival of the Fittest”, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world", “You’re poor/sick because you’re stupid & lazy.”, etc.
We become ghostly. Yin-deranged. The overwhelm we feel as more yin constitution people amplifies and stagnates. It breeds the addictions of victimhood, suicidality and other forms that mirror the yang-deranged counterparts. Ghosts. Cold echoes of unresolved fate. The ones that identify with their ignominious abuse and trauma. They eventually feel power in their powerlessness and thus the pact to become a ghost is solidified. They haunt are haunted long before they die.
Beyond ghosts and demons: the nondual bastard. This is the person who begins to sit with and burn through the sludge at the bottom of the dried-up well. This person begins to see the inherent and always-existing nihilistic honesty that lies under the delusions and stories that humankind concocts in order to dissociate themselves from the consequences of their own misconduct. This person sees hypocrisy, immaturity and ignorance as the underlying truths of being a human being. Through this horrific acceptance and annihilatory process, the nondual bastard discovers an indescribable and unprovable path that is neither ghost nor demon yet has aspects of both. This terrible fate is the only real fate that has any honesty in it whatsoever and therein lies the terrible joke of nature. At a certain point, the nondual bastard forgets their self, forgets their personality, forgets their opinions and preferences, forgets their false hopes and delusional trust, and returns to the great chaos at the heart of reality. Outcast, Vagrant, Scavenger, Homeless, Orphan, Abandoned are all words that are used to describe these people, lumping them ion with the “undesirables”, the “savages” and the “useless”.
Bliss Fiends. These are people who cannot stomach the emptiness and honesty of the nondual bastard and thus work at becoming a devotional avatar that spews mythic sentiment and pleasure rhetoric. The less said about these people the better, but they occupy every street corner and advertisement, every academy and orthodoxy. They are the cult members who deny their cult membership. They purport to uphold righteous values, but so often commit atrocities to maintain any sense of stability in an inherently unstable void.
As we now, in the 21st century, witness the brazen murders and genocides of countless people, our collective karma-fate doubles down on draining the well. The depleting and consumption of resources (yin) speeds up beyond what anyone can imagine. AI and data centers the size of city-states exemplify our fevered sprint to the end of the rope.
The intensity of our 5 senses, thoughts and feelings will reach a boiling point. This is inevitable. For everyone, a breaking point will be reached. It may appear different for each person on the outside, via the plethora of fabricated narratives and justifications and religious fervor disguised as colonial “science”, but in the end, an addict at the end of their rope is an addict at the end of their rope: ROCK BOTTOM.
Many people will cling to the threads of hope, constantly hacking their neurobiology to create a fragile membrane between their feelings and the world. (Demons & Bliss Fiends.)
Some will fetishize despair and nihilism as a counterpoint to these hope-ists. (Ghosts.)
Many people will cling to trust as the golden rule, concocting procedure after procedure to create policies that appear to breed trust so that people “feel safe”. (Bliss fiends.)
Neither of these are anything other than delusion, but they take the place of Dignity when dignity cannot be imagined, cannot be expressed. Dignity is one potential hallmark of a nondual bastard, but because their path is unpredictable and unknowable, it can’t be said with certainty that all those on this path will have access to dignity. Karma-fate is not a perfectly edited mythology. That’s the addiction of Bliss Fiends and the Orthodox Cults.
Even so, even if one knows all this as fact-beyond-opinion, there is still dealing with the disability that arrives with the crippling of the biosphere and the deformation of the socio-cultural sphere. Humans are intimately interconnected with the biosphere, as well as our socio-cultural sphere. We are mirrors, our physiology asymmetrically mirrors these 2 spheres. As the biosphere and socio-cultural spheres are abused, deformed, mutated and disabled, so too do our bodies and minds becomes so, depending on our constitutions and karma-fate.
Coming to the end of today’s little rope
Regardless of the path you choose, or the path that you appear to be forced into, given enough time, all being’s memory fades and is forgotten. Therefore, no matter what happens, no matter how much the ground is stained with the blood of children, there will come a point in Time & Space where there is no more preference, no more individuals, no more narratives, no more memory, no more “bodies that keep the score” because the body of reality itself only appears to keep score temporarily.
Eventually all of this, every human emotion, every ambitious aspiration, every feeling and sensation we are addicted to will cease. Exhaust itself naturally in the course of its cycle.
In the meantime, do you have any agency? Do you have any access to uncolonized perception? Or will you merely and predictably thrash against the human condition and come up with yet another strategy for salvation? It is, however banal, a very human thing to succumb to.
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Thank you. In other words, for still having these tangible bodies that require energies and care to maintain, would the unspoken, optional “lesson” here be embodying the mundane and being fully present at all the moments (as much as one can), practicing stillness/ability to return to stillness, no matter what “shows” up?
I had a dream recently. The dream itself was a "voice" to me. I asked the dream, how is it that one experiences more lightness, more play. And the dream revealed to me the quickness by which things change. How a bad mood becomes a good mood, how a love for someone erupts, how it fades. A storm rolls over this hills and passes right on by, revealing the calm sun again. I woke up thinking about all these long-held, nearly engrained patterns that live in us, like a kind of defiance towards the simplicity of the dream's message. But then, the day went on. The questions changed. The night came. I was asleep again.