WEEKLY WTF
02-26-24 Edition
The Best Days are Just Days
You’ll figure it out.
Take a Fucking Break
Do you need a f*cking break? Me too, let’s go do that.
EMPTY
What do you notice when you enter a room? Do you fancy yourself an artsy fucker and so you pay attention to the decor? Maybe you just want to sit your tired ass down so you scope out the comfiest furniture upon which to plant yourself. Are you a thief looking at stuff to steal? Are you hungry hunting for a meal? Perhaps you’re an architect or builder and you notice the form and function or the construction of the room. Maybe you’ve swept in like a 1940’s movie star and are focused on the people and their reactions to your glory. Reciprocally maybe you slunk in with head down eyes darting up furtively in hopes that people don’t quite notice you. Could be you compare: “Damn this place is nice I wish my fucking place was this nice.” Or “What a dump I’m glad my place isn't such a shithole.” The point here is that we all look for and see different aspects of the same thing.
But riddle me this: What is the actual predominant aspect of any room? Are you in a room right now? If so, gaze about and see what you notice. What dominates? Is it the contents? Is it the structure? Have you figured it out yet? It’s neither. We are so object-centric that we miss the most obvious aspect of any room and of the entire fucking universe for that matter. And in fact even though we are object-centric, we are even more thought-centric to the point that we barely even register objects because we’re mostly lost in our thoughts. This thing I’m getting at is also true of our minds. We notice thoughts but not the lucid field from which they arise and fall back into. I’m talking about- Emptiness.
We like things that we can slap a label on. We turn objects into names and then file those names into one of three mental bins: I like it, I hate it or I don’t give a shit about it. For the sake of imagery imagine a sort of radar projecting from your sense organs. A focused spiral beam from your eyeballs scanning shit, a passive spiraling ping from your ears that bounces off of objects. That’s not actually whats happening of course, not physically but mentally it’s close enough. Here’s what I mean; we see an object, or that is to say, our eyes allow photons bouncing off an object to enter our wrinkly pink meat computer which then re-assembles the photonic data and assigns it a word and assesses whether or not it supports who we think we are or want to be. If it does, it goes into the ‘I like it” bin. If it does not support who we think we are or want to be it goes into the “I hate it” bin. If it does neither then it goes into the “I don’t give a shit” bin. We have turned the act of perceiving into a validation of our own reality by creating a relationship buffer between us and an object so that we can regard ourselves as being separate from it. Attraction, aversion and neutrality are the three invisible baby arms that protrude and gesticulate from our mind. One grasps, one pushes and one flips the bird and waves away as if shooing a mosquito. There's also a fourth baby arm way down South for about 50.25% of humans, but let's not get distracted.
Let’s look at the room again, do you see now? Most of what a room is, is emptiness. That's why it’s called a room, because there’s a buncha fucking room in it, hellooooo. If a room didn’t have any room in it it would be called, I don’t know, a block I guess. It’s easy to miss because emptiness doesn't really have any attributes that we can use to validate our existence as a thing separate from other things in reality. Emptiness isn’t something that is created nor can it be destroyed. Whatever room you’re in or imagined, whoever laid that foundation and put up the walls and put the shingled frosting on top did not create the space within, they just put a physical line of demarcation around it and said “look I made a space” when in fact what they did was put a little cage around emptiness. Behind everything is emptiness. Dig a hole and contemplate the emptiness within. Did it flood in like water would? Did you have to go buy a bag of emptiness from Home Depot to dump in it? Wait, side note: people sell water and even air, can I sell emptiness and fucking retire already? Doubtful, we inherently know without knowing that emptiness can only be revealed.
If you’re getting a handle on this emptiness business then we can extrapolate and contemplate it a bit further. Maybe go outside and notice that, first of all, that there is an outside and you are able to move your meat tractor through space to get there by virtue of the fact that there is space, aka emptiness, through which it’s possible to move. What do you notice out there? I’m not going to load you down with all the possible shit you might see, we know where this is going. What I’m attempting to do is allow you a different way of viewing reality. As we walk or drive or fly along the outer skin of this little salty mudball we do so through emptiness. If our path takes us to a mountain then we require an empty tube, aka tunnel, through which to move. Look up and even if it's cloudy try to let the enormity of emptiness into your awareness. If your mind keeps attaching to stuff or the undeniably solid earth itself then realize that all the stuff stuck to, and the earth itself, is moving 67,000 Miles per hour through empty space and on top of that the milky way is moving 32 million miles per day through the empty void of our universe. If you were able to drop a waypoint in the universe this very moment right where you are whilst sitting or standing still, or maybe you’re taking a shit, it’s none of my business if you are, but then within seconds both you and the entire earth would no longer occupy that singular point in space and would already be occupying the emptiness along its trajectory through the big empty. This is a very simple deduction but again, I’m attempting to twist your mind a bit. Next time you're in a room, notice the emptiness. Next time you walk around, contemplate the empty space required for you to do so, or don’t, I’m not the fucking boss of you. You’re life is dominated by emptiness whether you think on it or not.
You ever look at photos from like the hubble telescope and think “Wow that’s a lot of shit floating around out there.” And indeed there is, however, the percentage of the universe that actually contains matter is only 0.00000000000000000000042 percent. I guess Douglas Adams kind of got it right after all in the Hitchikers guide to the galaxy. If you haven't read it, I’m not going to ruin it for you. I’m just pointing out our objectcentricities. Oooh I think I just made up a word. Anywho as above so below: An atom is 99.99999999999996 percent empty. Now to be as absolutely scientifically accurate as possible as per my googling skill will allow, the emptiness in an atom is dominated by an electron cloud and its nucleus contains 99.95 percent of the atoms mass and that nucleus contains even smaller unmeasurable bits like protons, neutrons, gluons and whatever other ons that are held together by the strongest known fundamental force so cleverly named the “strong force” but even so by volume it’s mostly empty. The emptiness of space also allows itself to be soaked by quantum fields that give rise to particles and then there's dark matter, cosmic rays, etfucking cetera. But are you picking up what I’m putting down? I’m not trying to give you a fucking science lesson I’d rather you distill these facts into an experience in which you become aware of emptiness, instead of being so addicted to form.
Perceiving emptiness is kind of a weird deal because there is nothing to hang your perceptual hat on. It surrounds you, it mostly is you but the mind can't quite grab it and that’s a good thing. It’s best not to treat emptiness like you do form by making up labels for it, labels don’t stick very well to nothingness. Just be aware of it, feel it, intuit it. You are in it, it is in you. Being made of atoms you are mostly empty space so that emptiness in you can connect to the emptiness around you, like a drop of water merging into the sea. Reality is dominated by emptiness. And again as above so below, and in the middle too. Our minds are a wakeful emptiness within which thoughts occur. Within the emptiness of space, cosmic shit occurs. Within the emptiness of an atom, electron clouds occur and again- within the lucid cognizant field of consciousness, mental events occur. This is the point where we must deviate from shit that can be googled or learned. The emptiness of mind can only ever be an experiential awareness. Science, religion or even philosophy can’t fully contain it in any sort of thought vessel. The field of mind transcends thought and as a result thought cannot encapsulate it. But we sure do fucking try. Religions and spiritual systems of all sorts attempt to do so and as a result we shroud and obscure it with Gods and scriptures and dogma but the basis is the same. Every being who has genuinely woken the fuck up has awoken to this wakeful emptiness. It would be best to let it remain a nameless thing. However, being the thought-centric creatures that we are, throughout the centuries we have adorned emptiness with thousands and thousands of names.
There are all sorts of tricky schemes to try to reveal this thing. Meditation is a very common one that allows a glimpse of it between thoughts if one is able to not grasp at the glimpse thereby fucking it up. Devotion is a sugary path that can get one beyond their perceived sourness. Action without reward and relaxing into the present moment can steer you that direction. But ultimately this nameless thing that presents as emptiness, only because it has no attributes that we can be cognizant of, is difficult to see because it actually is cognizance itself. It’s like trying to eat your own mouth. It’s like your eyeball trying to see itself, you have to kind of give up and just see. It’s not a matter of attaining or gaining. Here is a metric to decide if you’ve figured it the fuck out: If something comes unto you that wasnt there before then that aint it. Anything that comes must also go, that's the basic rule of reality. The one constant is change. This thing that’s not a thing is something that presents as nothing that's never not been there. You can name it if you want but then it will only actually exist within the thought plane in one of those three bins. If you reach through the bars of expectation into the cage of mental definitions to grab the magic banana of emptiness then the very act of grasping itself will prevent you from withdrawing your monkey fist from the narrow expectation bars and you'll be stuck only with definitions but will never have the experience of it. You can say “Whoo Whoo, Haa Haaa HHAAaaa” which translates to “Look I have the banana” and you do indeed, you have the banana, one that you can never fucking eat though. Unless of course, you let go.
Emptiness abounds. The wakeful emptiness of mind is not a sequestered thing. Just as waves rise from the stillness of the sea, just like thoughts blossom from the wakeful void within our experience of existence, so too matter itself fruits from the emptiness. Existence is awake but for fucks sake don’t take my word or anyone else’s word for it because it’s not a damn word. Seek emptiness within which form occurs and relax into the emptiness behind thought. It’s not a concept to attach to though, It's just a way to trick your well honed evolutionary processes in order to hopefully wake the fuck up to what you've always been. Don’t be a bald ape, let go of the banana to reveal what is. We can also recognize the emptiness in our circumstances. We try to constantly fill the next moment with something, with an action or expectation or we impregnate fear into the next moment by worrying about negative potentialities. Well, guess what, there is no next moment, it’s empty. Try letting it stay that way. Life gets more interesting and even fun when you allow yourself to be surprised once in a while by allowing everything to rise from the emptiness just as it is without labeling or fixating upon it. Then surprise becomes delight. You can just fucking chill in emptiness, it’s a thing.
I think, in part, it may seem futile for me to attempt to suggest that you undermine thought with thought or dissolve perception through suggesting you alter the way you perceive, but fuck it. We are bound by the medium of words which naturally inspire thoughts and here we go again deciding if these concepts of emptiness add unto us and will be transformed into some kind of belief or if it does the more likely thing which is to not support or verify our existence and gets labeled, “bullshit” or “fuck that” or “no way” or “whatevs”. It’s easy to realize emptiness in reality using our perception. It’s self evident and merely requires a shift in what we choose to focus on. And while I consider this a beneficial practice which could lead to a glimpse it’s still a thing bound by perception which gets filtered through the sticky neural web in the thought plane. I could probably write all damn day and never really get there but I don’t lament it because no book ever written has managed it. A single thought cup cannot contain an infinite ocean of awareness. We have to dig a hole in our mind, revealing that mysterious effulgent and primordial awareness that is the substratum of our experience of existence. The wakeful emptiness that fornicates with and becomes enamored and bound by thoughts, every moment births a new baby whose name is always: Now.
So here we go, you will either relate to this or you won’t. But if you don’t perhaps at some point you will. Maybe fuck around with it and see what happens. I think one of the most everyday experiences of emptiness occurs in the creative process. Don’t worry you don’t have to consider yourself an artist. That's just a label anyway, we are all creators and as a creation must have a genesis and be created there must be a space in which it was created, or a nothingness that becomes a somethingness. It must arise from somewhere. An idea can be generated from the thought plane by drawing upon memory. Inspiration though, is a different matter. Inspiration does not need to rely on memory, it comes from elsewhere. If your smart phone has no service then you're limited to whatever apps are on it and it will not update or be fully functional without connectivity. The creative process uses mind apps but more importantly it seems like it has a receiving quality that reaches into the wifi signal radiating throughout the great emptiness. There are multiple iterations of this process, this intuition of a signal and subsequent download. I think the majority of folks prone to executing their inspirations into reality would relate to this paradigm but this framework requires a you and a signal and some sort of nebulous source. It is being co-opted by and bound within the thought plane in order to further verify our existence as a thing separate from other things. I’m not saying there's anything wrong with it, I’m just suggesting that it is more of a belief system which may obscure the experience itself. I have toyed with the idea, the notion that the universe bloomed wrinkly pink meat antennas to pick up some greater signal. I like the idea of it but have to admit that for me it’s only an idea, not a true and unpolluted experiential awareness of awareness.
Every once in a while someone asks me “Where do you come up with this shit?” or “How do you know all this?” or “what did you study to get where you are.” I never know what to say because in a way, I don’t really fucking know, nor do I really need to. Sure I read a shit-ton of books when I was younger but never adopted any of the ideas therein as a perpetual paradigm just because I felt it might add unto and support a fabricated idea of my existence. Certainly some of those concepts became experiential realizations but only because I was willing to dive into emptiness to let go of the concepts in exchange for experience. I haven't read much of anything in the last 20 years other than entertaining fiction primarily because I know that the ideas would obscure the emptiness. I’ve spent a long time digging a hole and am careful not to kick any of the dirt back into it. From books came realizations based on experience. Only by letting go of not only experience but the implied existence that they offered to me was emptiness revealed. So where does this shit come from? If I try, if I make an effort it comes from my thoughts and memories and usually is shitty and so I shit can it. If I get out of the way though, if I relax into non-effort and fall back into the void then something interesting happens. The thing I am calling emptiness is the middle, the heart, the core of our experience. It is the light in the back of the movie projector that shines through the strip of constantly moving film of our thoughts. I’m trying so hard to explain the unexplainable that I’m just obscuring it with analogies but, fuck it thats all I’ve got. It’s like the emptiness in my middle puffs, I mean like a gentle exhale of emptiness. It, being empty, has no tangible quality about it other than its wakefullness and movement which is detected as it passes the event horizon that lies along the border of emptiness and thought and as it escapes the void and moves through the thought plane the current creates eddies and those eddies gather thoughts and those thoughts attract like thoughts and a translation then happens. A transcript of emptiness colored by an individuals collection of experience and vocabulary gets written, or in my case, typed out by thumbs onto a piece of rectangular glass.
Does that sound weird? I suppose it is unless you create in this way. There are much weirder ways to explain this process. Some folks decide that it is channeling, back to the meat antenna analogy, and assign individual entities as being the source of the information. Maybe that's a thing, I’ve toyed with it myself long ago but it never sat quite right with me. There was always a contingent of thought dedicated to creating a scaffolding of belief to support it. I’m not trying to dis-prove anything, it's just not my bag. Since antiquity we have been looking for and naming the source of inspiration, we call them muses, a guiding sort of genius that inspires or moves through us. The Greeks came up with 9 of them depicted in flowing robes or hanging out scantily clad. You just know that they were having muse orgies and shit. It’s only natural, I mean making up muses not orgies, considering that we are both thought-centric and object-centric. If we can’t name a thing then we can’t bounce either attraction, aversion or neutrality against it and thus our self created and ever changing shade of individual existence cannot be supported and the reaction to that is often something like “Fuuuuck that shit, I exist damnit!”
If I was forced to categorize myself, my proclivities, my identity, etc, I would have to say that above all else, I’m empty. Not in a Debbie downer kind of way or an implied lack. Not in a vapid or dull sense. I mean that emptiness is what's there when I bother to look. It’s what prevents me from answering a lot of fundamental questions about myself or this shit I put out. What I am to you is a projection of characteristics that arise in your mind and your natural mental and emotional response to those characteristics. That’s true for everyone, me included. But the experience of being me as me, seems to be mostly empty, it's odd I suppose. My memory is for shit and in fact if suddenly my inability to recall things was a recent phenomenon I’d be concerned that I have dementia or Altheimers or some shit but I’ve for sure been like this for at least 26 years, to my wifey poos dismay. When I get done saying all these words about emptiness that's just where they’ll all go, right back into the cosmic toilet bowl, the swirling and sucking void. If I start thinking about it I generate thoughts that tell me something might be very wrong with me. But then I generate counter thoughts that say, although you’re fucking weird in relation to your own projections of how other people generally are, maybe you’re actually doing it right. And if I don’t get involved with the angel and devil fucking with each other on my shoulders then I can boil it down and experience what it feels like being empty amongst emptiness. I can’t describe it because emptiness isn’t within the thought plane. Emptiness is referenceless, no past, no future, just now, an experience in which mundanety becomes extraordinary and the extraordinary is recognized as inherent and ever existent and becomes mundane once again. Strange vacillations of realization which become swallowed by thoughts and then digested, defecated and forgotten, then the cycle begins again. A dance of emptiness and form. Of awareness and thought. Of enjoyment and suffering allowed and unhindered by the need to define or categorize. I am empty, that’s it. But within emptiness all manner of shit may be allowed to manifest freely. Love and hate, joy and suffering, good and bad, right and wrong, good moods- bad moods, self confidence and low self esteem. Opposites, duality, all the fucking things occur within emptiness. They are waves which rise from an empty lucid sea and build and cross paths and sink back down from whence they came. The trick isn’t to become the sea, it sort of defeats the purpose of this whole thing but entirely identifying with the waves always leads to suffering. But to be the sea that is aware of and allows it’s waves, now that… is sumthin’ special. This emptiness business, is a finger pointing at the substratum of the idea of you, toodaloo.
Alrighty, well… have the week you want not the week you’re given. It’s up to you. You’re the one livin’.
Toodaloo
