WEEKLY WTF
05-13-24 Edition
Existential Mosquitoism
What’s the fucking point!?
Magic
We’re all just looking for a little magic, are we not?
Mindhole
Find it, finger it.
Window Pain
You gotta get through it.
It’s You!
Do you know what’s extraordinary about this photo? It's not the composition, contrast or color. It’s not the framing or subject. It’s also not the fact that I quickly tapped my thumbs on a piece of glass and transferred it from my piece of glass to your piece of glass. It’s not the frozen moment of time or the timing of the scene itself. The most extraordinary fucking thing about this photo, is you.
This pic, that you are currently staring at, is being blasted as photons of light into your eye and that light is hitting the sensitive membrane in the back of your eyeball, called the retina. Then cells called photoreceptors (photo/ photon, go figure!?) turns the light into electricity which then gets zapped all up in your wrinkly pink meat computer where it is then organized and turned into a depiction of what you’ve come to think of as reality. It then slides into a pre-existing story you’ve told yourself about the persistent illusion of reality you’ve come to know and to love and to hate and all the things and feels. It’s an extremely small slice of the enormous amount of data that’s whizzing about which becomes your perceived outer dimension but it is in fact an entirely inner experience. Reality occurs within you. I mean sure… all that is actually pretty extraordinary but that’s not what the fuck I’m talking about either.
That orange sky is a color unique to you in the sense that you will never be able to perceive another person's perception of orange nor will anyone ever know just how orange your orange is.
That Pelican in flight you see invokes an inner story of which you may not be aware of. Maybe the story is simply “fucking bird” told quickly so you can move onto the next bit of story. Perhaps you have a special affinity for Pelicans and the story written in the book of mind elicits a slight flood of brain juice and you get a feel or two out of it, or other neurons are excited and a stored story called “memory” is invoked. It’s pretty damn extraordinary how our brain condenses shit into one story after another to save processing time. But that’s not the extraordinary thing of which I speak.
The most extraordinary thing, about any thing, is the thing we overlook the most. We overlook it because it doesn’t have a story. The word “mind” invokes all manner of stories; of cranial cavities and wrinkly pink meat. Of thoughts and emotions and states of being or whatever your story about it happens to be. The word “consciousness” has the same effect; a series of stories and definitions and descriptions and comparisons and so forth. These words are as about as close as we can come to this extraordinary thing I am pointing at but if we continually juggle them about sequestered only within the thought plane then this “thing” will remain overlooked. We make consciousness into a word, a story, a definition and thus we skip over the fact that it is in fact the substratum of our experience of existence. It’s not a thing to look at, it’s the thing that looks.
Thoughts are electrical and chemical events that occur within the brain. They come and they go and ultimately they don’t really have any purchase in material reality. Have you ever tried to find a thought? To measure and quantify it? To invoke the exact experience of a thought in another persons mind? In a strictly material sense thought doesn’t even exist. If you don’t agree that’s fine, show me a thought and I’ll stand corrected.
This extraordinary fucking thing I’m getting at doesn’t have a word and a story needs words to be written. It’s what the entire universe is made of, and I mean that on multiple levels and in many ways. The most simple of which I’ve alluded to by describing how rellality is simply shards of data arranged in the mind. Everything you see and hear and experience is formulated within your mind in the form of thoughts that don’t actually exist and yet so called material reality is viewed through this filter of non existent thought. Pretty fucking weird eh? But I’m not talking about brain function, I’m talking about the experiencer of said experience. I’m talking about you.
Not your stories or self assigned characteristics or your attractions or aversions or oh so holy opinions. Not your beliefs or the size and horsepower of your meat tractor. I’m talking about the wakefulness within the empty mind, the ever calm, un-affected, still and serene, primordial unchanging sense of existence that is the eye of the storm of thought.
It feels like “I am” but that’s not to be confused with “I am a this or I am a that”. It is the lucid experiencer of experience. It is the unknowing knower of knowledge. It is awareness without the “of”. It’s just fucking you- existing as existence itself without any baggage whatsoever.
It’s hard to notice being the eye of the storm because the hurricane of thought and information is so damn compelling. We are always in the eye of this storm but we don’t know it because all we know how to do is look “out there”. This proclivity to always look out is born of identification. From our lucid middle we identify with the fast moving winds of thought carrying emotional debris and shit which constantly fly by. Awareness identifies with “of”. Like: (I am) aware “of” this, or aware “of” that but the faculty of awareness itself goes unnoticed in the same way that an eye doesn’t see itself.
This thing I’m telling you about I can’t really tell you about because it transcends words and stories, it can only ever be an experiential awareness of awareness. It's too close, too simple, too fundamental. No one can give you what you already have. It’s like the color orange in the photo, how do you describe that color without using comparisons? One can only point at it so that perhaps you will glance in the right direction and notice it and thus you experience orange. Noticing the very fact that we are capable of noticing is an even more elusive thing. It’s consciousness turned inside out such that it becomes conscious of consciousness itself. Orange you gonna look or what?
I know, WTF right? It’s an extraordinary pickle, and yet also no big dill. It’s a riddle that’s not a riddle, a secret that’s not secret. If you think about that fact that you are conscious and it doesn’t stir anything then it’s simply because you’ve always been that and there is no story that can contain it. It’s not the story that’s written by the mind, it’s the blank page that the thought story is written upon in the book of consciousness. If however, you get a glimpse of how fucking strange and wonderful and absolutely absurdly extraordinary sentience is then, you’re doing something right, keep doing (or not doing) that.
We chase this big mystery around and slap names on it and build religions and shit around it and we don’t think we’re reaching it, so it seems like it’s a carrot on a stick. We don’t recognize the fact that it is ever present. It is what seeks. Seeking seeks its self. We don’t recognize it because we’ve never not been it. On one hand it’s the most fundamentally mundane experience there is, however, if you can view it anew, in the raw so to speak, and feel the awe of a thing you’ve always known but didn’t realize you knew, that is a fucking extraordinary thing. Extraordinary mundanity. Orange you glad you fucking exist!?
Look around, most of the objects of reality do not appear to be sentient. Most of the aggregate of this salty mudball we’re stuck to is just stuff. How the fuck does “stuff” wake up and become aware that it’s awake? Who fucking cares! Don’t weave a story about it, just try to directly experience the experience of it. There’s nothing woowoo about this shit, unless that’s your preferred story of course. You have a front row seat to exactly what the hell I’m talking about, you, existing, knowing you exist simply by the fact that you have the ability to know.
It really is weird, you know? Consciousness that is, and how it weaves the world and yet is the world like some kind of soup sandwich who’s layers are named and yet ultimately from the right angle indistinguishable from one another. But what I’d like to end with before this gets any fucking longer or weirder is that within you, at all times, is this thing, this ineffable effulgent cognizant awareness right there in the middle of the story you call “me”. You are a temporary wave in an infinite ocean of awareness. Don’t just take my word for it though, not mine or anyone’s, don’t get trapped by stories. See it your own damn self. It’s not something gained, it’s something uncovered. It’s both extraordinary and it’s no big fucking deal. It’s not thought, it’s what shines through thought in the same way that a white light shines through a strip of moving film which then projects a perceivable reality. You’re already experiencing it, I promise. To try to talk about the baseline of reality beyond concepts and words gets fucking weird. You almost have to speak in opposites. It’s so fucking mundane! It’s so fucking extraordinary! More so than any color or bird or stories created about such things. Orange you fucking amazed!?
I’m failing to describe this thing because it’s not a description. It is simply an experiential awareness of your inherent awareness. It is like the empty sky that allows every cloud. It is like space that allows all cosmic phenomena to move about. In any room it is not the walls or ceiling or floor or decor or furniture, it is the sequestered square shaped emptiness that allows items to exist within it but we always describe the features, never the most predominant aspect, emptiness. There’s always room in a room that’s why we call it a room for fucks sake. This concept, that’s actually only an experience, is the wakefull string that is strung through the beads of reality. The string that weaves through the beads of the cosmos is composed of this wakeful emptiness I’m alluding to and the self same string, as it moves though beings of meat, presents as awareness or consciousness or whatever you don’t wanna call it. The universe is awake for fucking fucks sake!
Well shit, what I meant to say was “I didn’t stay up for the northern lights thing so enjoy this pic of a pelican”. Oh well, fuck it. It is now a long winded invitation for you to expand your experience of existence. To lean way back behind thought. It’s not an action per say. You can’t use thought to transcend thinking, you have to sort of just relax into it, into what you actually and already are in the middle of this strange dream of one dreamer dreaming itself as every possible iteration of itself throughout the fucking multiverse. So forget everything I have said here and directly experience your own “youness”. You are what’s extraordinary. Ok, that’s it, toodalooness!
Alrighty, well… have the week you want not the week you’re given. It’s up to you. You’re the one livin’.
Toodaloo
