march 1, 2025

whenever childhood ceased for it

the goal, really, is to evaporate. the goal, i am realising, cannot be a goal at all. my mind – the ‘western mind’, if i must attribute it to some cause – is in the rotten habit of turning experiences into goals, and not letting them be. i am writing decaffeinated again, and that is a risk, or a method, to let things spill in whatever form they must. this time it came to me during meditation, or zoning into the miracle tones playlist that has been rising up my spotify ranks, and said – the goal is to evaporate. as soon as one evaporates, or ‘burns entirely’ as Shunryu Suzuki said, one is at the cusp of freedom. it does not last long, but it is a taste of a beyondness that cannot be forced into description. in fact, the precise point – and the precise puzzle – is that what needs to be experienced here cannot fit into words. it cannot, as law, not cannot, as in it is very difficult until the right poet waves the right wand. it cannot, as fact, and that is the great catch of all this. you cannot think about what you want to experience. you cannot label it, you cannot attribute it, you cannot analyse it, you cannot teach it, you cannot cling to it, you cannot relate to it, you cannot touch it with the faintest stick the mind might wield. the mind interrupts the body, and the body emerges from oblivion. the mind awakens, and relates, and claims, and excites, and despairs, and the body disappears from sight. it is a mystery and the ultimate form of trust to let the body simply be. it is a skill too, i hope, which is why alan watts depressingly said it might take 30 years. i will choose to ignore that information, partly because i am trying not to turn everything into a goal, but partly because i know my subconscious has done so anyway. i love that this way of being defies goalness and goalseeking, because the experience is in its very essence contradictory to the aims of definition, let alone analysis, of what something is. you cannot make presence a goal in any meaningful way, or at least in any granular way, without spoiling the pursuit entirely. that is a wonderful lesson to learn for someone who has spent her whole life grasping. do not think about an elephant. there you go. i hate that it requires such deep trust, because i have a ruptured relationship with the universe, or at least some unresolved business with it. i have not yet settled on whether it is a benevolent figure, or whether things are random, harmonious, chaotic, perfect, karmic, or divine. which camp you choose does seem to make a difference, i think, at least in governing your ability to trust the present moment will not lead to your annihilation. do you choose the ideology or does the ideology choose you? is it an ideology, or a philosophy, or a fact? the irony is that all these questions are once again matters that reject belonging to the present moment, which seems, even more ironically, to be the only thing all spiritual teachers have ever agreed upon. but the tenet be present always sits within a broader set of tenets which must ultimately give it some context, and therefore meaning. i.e. are you present because you must act on your dharma or because all suffering is attachment or because there is a tao that is flowing beneath our feet and cannot speak until we are still? all the beliefs that do not have to do with being present must in some way shape why to be present, at least beyond the certainty of the fact that it is the only place we ever are. that is comforting and true, but the body is trying to build a habit here. the body is learning something it unlearned whenever childhood ceased for it. i wonder if it was a slow and gradual ceasing, a process of learning to escape because there was a fire and the fire was bad and the fire was shamed and so the fire must stop, or a one-and-done severing between seasons of being and thinking. maybe it was a toggling of sorts, between phases when the body felt sort of okay being here and now, and phases when the body decided it was better to be somewhere else. i wonder how much of it hinged upon our inability to bear pain, without despair, without shame, without resistance, without fear. probably all of it. probably all of life was built on the avoidance of pain. i have reached this conclusion before, but i am now entering it through the door on a floor of a different building. the problem is that efforts towards avoiding pain do not exist without experiences that demonstrate its absence, or better yet, its exact opposite. it is equally problematic that we feel positive emotions – however fleeting – as we feel negative ones. the problem is that they are fleeting, but that part is always ignored. pain or discomfort is always bookmarking the most miniscule experiences of joy and contentment, and they are together creating the sturdiest of bookshelves. there is one very thin book of genuine glee, and it is surrounded by editions, thick and thin, of how glee does not exist. or that glee does not exist, and one must shuffle desperately, desperately desperately, to find that this tiny little book again. even if it means bruising your frantically thumbing hands and breaking your brittle thin wrists and cowering your whole damn body in the searching of something that only creates a larger void. even if it means spending your whole damn life – wasting your whole damn life – racing for a mirage. the goal is to evaporate. the goal is to evaporate. the goal is to burn the entire damn bookshelf, and be as thin as a page. exist on the razor edge of this moment, as whichever Zen buddhist said, and Eckhart Tolle probably rephrased. it doesn’t matter. the truth is still the truth, and for a moment, i will even set aside the wars and ethics of who-said-what. the goal is not a goal, but if i must define what i am trying to do, it is to become – on a crowded, towering, falling bookshelf – a single standing page. i hate when i take my metaphors too far, because it tires me to need to honour what i unknowingly started. a bit like this writing, because the lack of caffeine is hitting me now, and i haven’t decided an outfit, and the journey to the cutest little neighborhood i have allocated for the day is about an hour long. the good news is i only exist in this moment, and there is no future at all. okay, this moment is decaffeinated, but that is far more manageable than the issue of what to do with the day, or what to do with my life. so i shall move. <3 adios, page!