The Knot Can’t Undo Itself
Seeking Makes the Seeker
(This post is the second of a blog being built elsewhere (https://knotthere.net). If you feel so inclined, please go subscribe to the RSS feed, as the majority of posts, in time, will be exclusive to that site.)
We are “what” is seeing, not the “who” that’s looking.
- Paul Hedderman, The Escape To Everywhere
~
You have tried everything.
You have tried everything.
You have tried everything.
You have tried everything.
It started some time ago, you can’t exactly place when, but something started. Some process. Some sense that something is up. Some elusive notion that the world is, in some way, askew. Arriving alongside this notion, completely attached to it, in fact, was the concept, idea, or felt implication that there should be or is a solution. In short, you felt there was a problem, and as such, you sought out a solution.
Beginning, usually, as a directed attack on the consumerist culture of the day. This can’t be it!, you proclaim, targeting the conveyor-belt life of school, work, house, marriage, kids, retirement, and death, all heaped with a boat-load of material goodies along the way. This critique (possibly inclusive of some activism and political reading) doesn’t manage to change anything, and so you look elsewhere.
You turn to philosophy, because if culture isn’t it, then what the hell does it all mean? And so you start by loosely reading some historical overviews, then you find some thinkers and philosophers that gel, that seem to ‘get it’ (Camus, perhaps?), and you devour their collected works. That takes a while to digest and sees you through your formative years, but still you come out the other side not entirely satisfied with the results. Something is still up! You return to philosophy and this time read more precisely, possibly starting at the beginning and working your way through as systematically as you can, trying to find just that right set of words and arguments that will put your mind at rest and let you get on with your life. Maybe you find that some key figure (Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, Plato, Aquinas, Foucault, Stirner, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Kant, Heidegger, Whitehead, or Wittgenstein, maybe?) does it for you, and you stick around in their camp for a while, rebounding and reflecting everything and anything off their ideas as a form of ontological anchor. But it just doesn’t last. And so you move to even more obscure thinkers, even more obscure philosophies, again, trying to find that right placement and ordering of arguments and words that will, somehow, (please!), tick the box, fill the void, just, somehow…work out. But it doesn’t, it’s a sludge, a soup of jargon that can be used for anything and everything, to defend (for or against) anything and everything. Words atop life, mucking around without skin.
So then you turn to spirituality. If words, arguments, and theories don’t cut it, then experiences and belief will! Of course, to begin at the dogmatic religions wouldn’t work. Due to their histories and closeness to philosophy, that would be a step in the wrong direction, so you begin now, in the present day. You start reading books that talk about alternative histories, heresy, and heterodox ideas. You look into Gnosticism, Theosophy, Gurdjieff, Steiner, Thelema, Hermeticism, and general esoteric currents of all shapes and sizes. You start meditating, eating differently, praying, acquiring a whole bunch of spiritual ephemera, your clothes are starting to feel looser, their colours more vibrant. But these—a bit quicker now it seems—also don’t seem to cut it, and maybe—you tell yourself—you need to cut the shit and accept some tough love! So you turn to religion (never thought you’d end up here, did you?), maybe it’s one that is seemingly directly outside of your immediate culture (They just don’t get it!), or maybe it’s one that is seemingly directly of your culture (Turns out we had it right all along!), either way, this is it, this is the truth, you have finally put your ego aside and are accepting what was all along, look at all this structure, this community, look at all this…why is there still a problem!?
You’ve cleansed your chakras, used some beads to pray, gone on retreats, joined various groups and orders, flirted with becoming a monk or nun, bioenergetically charged your body, used the gateway tapes to travel to the astral realm, had a few OBEs, ejaculated up your spine, achieved a few Jhanas, used the tarot for an investment deal, summoned an angel, flirted with becoming a priest, used alphabeti-spaghetti for divination, got in some ice baths, become ascetic, summoned a demon, become an Epicurean, psychosynthesized your brain, undergone CBT, done daily mindfulness, undergone human-centered therapy, breathed every which-way, attended retreats that felt off, undergone a healing ceremony, used tuning forks to eradicate…something, there are incense sticks everywhere, you own a small bell, analysed your dreams, slept on the floor, communed with an alien, automatically written a ton of utter crap, undergone hypnotherapy, actively imagined your way into the unconscious, realized capitalism is an AI, buteyko’d the hell out of your lungs, became a Stoic, primally screamed until you cried, remembered yourself (always!), gematrically figured out…nothing, and are still, for some reason or other, searching…seeking! Still, something is up!
~
The issue here is that what you are looking for is what you are, just not what thought declares you as when it presumes the ‘I’. It is the paradox par excellence, a tensed-up annoyance of a statement that drives thought to its breaking point, or silent point, if you will.
Let’s return to the knot that is ‘you’ or ‘I’. The knot is a story of the mind that is cohered in transit, yet never coherent. The presumptive statements of ‘I’ and ‘me’ are the empty force that tenses the knot, such presumptions that, on inspection, are seen to have no ground outside of a vague presumptive acceptance. Much like pain or the unconscious, when the ‘I’ is brought to the surface and looked at directly, it’s nowhere to be seen, it dissipates before it ever is.
Imagine a net, the kind used for fishing or football goals. At each intersecting point we might place a single memory, thought, sensation, emotion, perception, concept, or idea, a singular arising within/from the being that is you or me. In the case of the knot, we believe ourselves—that is, the ‘I’—to be the entire net all at once. When we refer to the knot, we refer to a presumed net of fully cohered aforementioned notions that, over time, has constructed itself as the ‘I’. Yet, when we really look at this supposed net, we find that only a single ‘point’ of intersection ever arises, before fading away and giving rise to the next disconnected thought etc. The story of the ‘I’, the knot, is the assumed net after the presumption of the ‘I’. The process of selfing[1] is a recursive process unto itself that is entirely empty within; the I says I am this only to itself. Yet, when awareness is directed to who or what says I…there is nothing there, a nothingness with only presence in its place, as presence was all there ever was.
Let’s get back to seeking. The issue with all the mentioned spiritual and philosophical pursuits (chakras, meditation, bodywork, and what have you) is that they all become food of identification for the knot. We move (seemingly instantaneously) from I am (presence) to I am this: I am X who has cleansed chakras, I am Y who has odd dreams, or I am Z who is close to a therapeutic breakthrough. Each identification bolsters the tension of the knot, therein continuing its presumed reality that is nothing more than an illusion of other presumed identifications. Each act of seeking (identification) is itself an act of paradoxical getting in one’s own way, it is a grasping at life, rather than the living of it as what Is.
All of these pursuits are experiences. Seeking is an experiential past-time that, as long as it continues, inherently presumes the ‘I’ that is the seeker. Experiences rise and fall. The knot seeks to capture these living movements and funnel them into its false-net. It seeks to possess them as to verify its claim of legitimacy, yet, when we look at this net of stagnant, captured memories we don’t find experiences, but merely thoughts long since dead. Each and every single act of seeking is an escape from what already Is.
What is before the seeking? Awareness, presence, call it what you will. What Is, is prior to all this. When you stop seeking, the you stops. Seeking is the tension of the knot, the pulling in any and all directions. When this action stops, the knot, by definition, ceases to be a knot, it can’t be a knot.
However, the stopping of seeking cannot itself be an act, because therein it would be a negative form of seeking. The seeker, the knot, can do or not do, but it cannot and will not not be a seeker. It will do anything to remain tense, to survive, because that very (empty) tension is its entirety.
It is a paradox.
The knot can’t and won’t undo itself. The knot, being a knot, can only use anything that comes its way to increase tension or knotting. 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.
What’s prior and always?
[1] For more on the idea of selfing, see Paul Hedderman’s book The Escape to Everywhere