Burnt Out Nothing - 1: Backed Into a Corner
It's just all gotta burn.
There’s a fire hidden in plain sight.
Feel it.
If you want the Truth then any idea or concept, notion or thought, belief or attitude, principle or value, must, by the fact of its supposed existence, be cast into the fire. The fire burns everything up. You’re left with nothing, you’ll be left with nothing, just the fire, burning burning. Until then…You are kidding yourself. You haven’t moved a single step because there’s no one to move and nowhere to move to and you’ve been arguing with rain, arguing with fire! arguing with Life! You are a fool. Full to the brim with shit! That all needs to be burnt out! You are a damned fool!
There is no one to move.
It appears as if there is such a thing as this ‘I’ that we call ourselves but there simply isn’t. It cannot be found other than as a first-person, singular pronoun. All that exists of the ‘I’ is just that, a momentary clutching sound—”I!”—that oversteps its bounds by tangling itself into everything and everything; the false ‘I’ usurps each situation to continue the lie of aggrandizement, to continue the idea that there is someone to be, somewhere to get, and that there is something to get, and the truth is, there is nothing to get, nothing to find, and no one to be. The unreality of this ‘I’ is a knot.
The knot speaks!
No self, no soul, no spirit, no mind, no center, no totality, no separation! These labels are all questions fed to you at some time or other, mulled over and over by the mind, entwined into the knot, and accepted as valid. The questioner is the question as the thinker is the thought. What makes up the self is solely the questions the self seeks to answer despite never questioning the questions themselves. What makes up the soul is solely talk of soul. The same for spirit, mind, and all these other falsely-anchored logos’. They are nothing but mumblings unto themselves. Every seemingly separate center is the exact same fear. Allow the fire to catch a thread and the knot starts to ache.
There is no outside-anything.
There is no outside-self, there is no outside-soul, there is no outside-spirit, and there is no outside-life! Knowing, reason, mind, and Spirit are not outside of life, but are (as everything is) part of it. However, the self-referential and halting, grabbing, clutching questioning of each is unto itself a neurological parasite or cancer; a question that asks of itself for the sake of asking of itself; the mind is a tyrant; thought is fascistic; answers beget the question beget the questioner. The question of meaning (born from mind) forces meaning, which therein is unfulfilling, thus aggrandizing the question of meaning as if it had any sense in the first place!
All must be burnt away.
Back to the self. There is a knot there that is not there. This knot is completely free-floating in space, pulling itself into a contraction. The knot doesn’t exist; it is not there, not really. The knot is a complete paradox. It pulls unto itself as to make itself contract and thus be and become a knot, but when we investigate the reality of that which pulls or is doing the pulling (therein that which would make it a knot altogether), we find nothing. Nothing is pulling the knot tight other than the pulling itself. A tightening unto itself. When ‘we’ (‘you’ or ‘I’) don’t look, it pulls and appears to exist. Yet, when we look, nothing is pulling the knot at all. When we look for the I, we find nothing.
The knot is the self, or more precisely, it is that which we refer to when we say ‘I’, as in the statements ‘I am James’, ‘I am an angry person’, or ‘I am discontent’. It is that which we refer to when we say ‘Me’, as in the statements ‘She knows me best’, ‘Don’t take it out on me…’, or ‘They’re plotting against me!’. It is that which we refer to when we say ‘Mine’, as in the statements ‘The privilege is mine’, ‘None of this is mine’, or ‘I’ve got mine’.
As is the nature of the knot, there are only three courses of possible action as to its experience: Tightening, untangling, or severing.
Tightening is the process of self-ing. This is what most people consider normality and thus reality. It is the process and existence of armoring, defense, clutching, holding, grasping, pleading, permanence, tensing, ambition, story, narrative, becoming, progressing, adding, aggrandizing, stasis, comfort, security, fine-ness, mortality, cold flesh, unlife, and boredom. As Life is flux, flow, and becoming, the self is the antithesis of life by the very fact it seeks permanence in everything it does.
Untangling is the non-process of unself-ing/de-selfing. The jury is out as to whether or not this is, or can be, a process altogether. Some (traditionalists) understand that, via certain practices, one can dissipate the self. Others understand that one can be pointed to or gestured toward unselfing, somehow seeing the dissipation of the self. Others say there is nothing to be done, and that any case of unselfing is acausal, or it just happens. The question of untangling is one of the paradoxes of self; in short, How can self get rid of self? The knot can do or not do, but it cannot and will not not be a seeker, not be a knot. It will do anything to remain tense, to survive, because that very (empty) tension is its entirety, the knot’s selfed tension is what it is.
Severing is an acausal event of complete knot destruction. Nothing can be said about this. There is no story here. No reason, no rhyme.
It is a paradox.
The knot can’t undo itself.
The knot, being a knot, can only use anything that comes its way to increase tension or knotting. ‘I’ can never not be ‘I’. The knot wants to remain as a knot, that is, all bundled up and contracted. Even when the knot seemingly hears this message, it will only utilize it for a more subtle type of contraction. So the knot can hear this message, but only in the sense in which a knot can hear (all tensed up), so it can’t really hear it. What hears it has nothing to do with anything and everything to do with nothing.
You can’t use mind to get out of mind.
The knot can’t undo itself.
Self can’t exit self.
I can’t not be I.
There is nowhere to move to, there is nowhere to go.
Any directionality, whether spatial, ideational, ideological, religious, political, mythological, or narratival, is aggrandized tension.
Any direction is itself an affirmation of the ‘I’ which moves. To posit the question of movement is to assume the answer of the mover. Yet, the latter isn’t, and so the former dissipates. Movement is not. There is simply now, now, now, without such a thing as ‘now’ ever being able to be defined, or, if you have it, you don’t have it.
Heraclitus says, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ His radical disciple Cratylus held that one cannot enter the same river twice, for…it cannot be done even once. And I state, further, that the center (self) required to posit the step, the stepping, and the river does not exist. Or, something maybe happened, apparently.
The knot is secondhand, it’s after the fact, after the situation, after the experience.
The apparent (yet false) twines, ropes, and strings that make up its knotting are only ever memories; they are only ever dead! The knot is secondhand deadness. A hand-me-down of time clung to itself for the sake of security!
The apparent tension and tightening that pulls these twines together is fear. Fear holds the self together, and yet, only fear dies. The dissipation of the self as the dissipation of fear is not, then, various singular acts of conscious, courageous overcoming, nor stoic shutting-out, or even metta cultivation, for in each of these is the self-same same self striving that tightens the knot in the first place.
That’s the corner you need to be backed into.
Then the fire starts.
From the position of that corner, the life of the spiritual seeker (or just plain old ‘seeker’) is nothing but a voided crapshoot, a drawn-out exercise in foot-shooting, complete with many merry melodies, fancy feelings, and wallet-wrecking retreats.
The spiritual seeker is society’s consumer par excellence.
Unlike the gearhead and his cars, or the foodie and their bougie restaurants, the seeker’s desires are unlimited, free-floating, and, ultimately, fucking vague! Oh, I want to find peace, tranquillity, contentment, fulfillment, enlightenment, God, rest, the spirit, the soul, or meaning, any of those will do nicely. Well, what in the hell are you on about? Who put these terms—and the questions of these terms—into your mind? Each of these terms, when transformed into a journey or path, negates its very definition and becomes solely an excuse!
Where did these questions come from?
Let us take ‘peace’ as an example of what the seeker desires. With many stating that they wish they could get to a place of peace in their lives. The answer, as always, is within the question. I desire peace (answer), and thus the question is How do I get peace? First and foremost, before any such search should begin, one could ask where in the world these ideas came from and how they got into their head? To what degree does the question-and-answer that is ‘peace’ have any bearing on reality whatsoever? Who the fuck are you to think that? Who defined peace? Who defined happiness? Why do I care about it? Why is it something I want? What even is peace, anyway?
That aside, we can see that the function of the seeker is to thwart the very thing they desire to have, for any such processual search for peace negates the possibility of peace. Any search for contentment is inherently discontented. Any seeking toward rest is going to be exhausting. Etc. The trick the self is playing with itself here is abiding by an unanswerable answer as to continue its process of tightening. In short, this is to say:
The anger is the anger itself.
The frustration is the frustration.
The boredom is the boredom.
The misery is the misery.
The genuine conclusion to these notions such as peace, contentment, or even God, isn’t found in some eventual answer, but in the dissipation of the question as a question. Answers carry no satisfactory weight or cathartic release (see: Philosophy), they merely bolster the idea that the apparatus of questioning has any fundamental merit regarding truth, which it doesn’t, because that very notion is equally as obscure and useless. If there was such a thing as answers, something—anything!—would have been solved by now, but it hasn’t, and won’t be, because Life is ever-moving, is Living!
The question has to burn itself out!
All questions must burn!
The spiritual marketplace is no different to any other marketplace. Except, at least elsewhere I might not be wearing cheap, scratchy linen and eating plain rice, having to chant some dumbass mantra all day. It’s complete with celebrities, diets, workouts, self-help, gadgets, products, and even creams! You’re no different to the rest of them. Why do you think you’re special? Why do you think you’re anything? Why did you ever assume there was more to be had?
To have is to want more.
The ‘spiritual seeker’ can be defined as someone who kicks up a load of dust, only to be amazed and bowled-over-by-wonder when they see through the dust to clear air. Morons.
The spiritual seeker kicks himself in the balls for the sake of the eventual relief.
The spiritual seeker has indigestion and needs a weapons-grade laxative!
Give up!
Any striving, any direction, any tension, anything at all, is a story for the self to cling to, to tighten itself from and with. Anything that is done is false, unreal; a narrative that extinguishes Life.
Any question implies a questioner, any answer presumes a question. Any description is of something dead. Any theory is of something lost.
All theorization, systematization, and understanding is solely a desire for permanence. The desire for permanence is the cause of all misery.
Experience and knowledge go hand-in-hand. There is no understanding, only perpetually incomplete knowledge, really nothing at all.
There is no exit. The desire for an exit is the problem. The desire to be other than we are, now. The desire to be other than Life.
There is nothing to be done and no one to do it.
Everything must be burnt out.
Just a burnt out nothing.
Brah, UH Krishnamurti hit you hard, this is raw and uncompromising. Wonder if the smile is smiling back from the burning flame or from the ashes... metta.