A Fragment on Nothingness
(from a work of fiction, but can be read as non-fiction)
Do you find that most of your life consists of going from room to room, turning on and off lights? This was the value prop that appeared, somewhere, although it could not be said to ‘appear’ because that implies an appraiser, a witness, and he was not currently there to witness it. The value prop—the proto-concept itself, embedded in those free-floating words, was all there was, entwined with the void itself so that while it persisted the void was gone, and all notions of positive or negative space disappeared. The word-concept was the monad, speaking and hearing itself, without referent. It was a shame that later he only remembered traces of these value props, vapors, because they were all great ideas, proto-concepts suggested either by his own unconscious, the collective unconscious of his genetic and memetic lineage, or else somehow co-occuring within the networked arbitrage of the universal machine, where the distinction between ‘his’ thoughts and ‘someone else’s’ thoughts and ‘their collective’ thoughts and then ‘the machine’s’ extrapolated understandings of those thoughts was so blurred as to be incomprehensible.
Nevertheless, this, and many other, proto-thoughts and value props would arise in the null space. What was it that made true nothingness replete with meaning, he would muse, later. No, not replete—overflowing. There was not an inch of nothingness that was not full of meaning—there were no gaps. Then, there was no nothingness, but only a somethingness, a background something which underpinned and permeated everything that surfaced up to higher and higher levels of conscious awareness. But even this conception didn’t suffice. The unconscious is not void, but literally full—more full, even, then conscious awareness, which does have gaps and lags and blank spots. In the depths, presence is revealed. But even this did not fully express the thought. Because, in that fullness where our conscious conceptual minds conceive of ‘nothingness’, we cannot even say it is permeated with a ‘somethingness,’ because that notion of ‘somethingness’ is a conscious thought-construct binarily designed to antonymize ‘nothingness,’ just as in formal logic ‘something’ (not-not) is the antipode of ‘nothing’ (not). Perhaps, then, the non-logical but syntropically correct term for that non-halfway middle, that third dimensional ‘dialectic middle’ which he called the syntropole, like the third leg of a triangle which completes and explains but does not emerge from the center of the other two sides, was the ‘everything.’
Then, ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ were terms of the conscious thinking mind, and the ‘everything’ was what was behind and below it all, the cosmic background radiation of unconsciousness, and to say it was ‘full’ or ‘empty’ or even ‘overflowing’ was to use the language of the conscious thinking mind, and not the unconscious’s own language, which denied and transcended all of these terms, and even resisted being called ‘the everything,’ although that was the closest word we had to map to it, because our conscious conception of ‘everything’ is ‘every something,’ aka ‘all the somethings,’ and that connotation is built on the implication of the ontological necessity of ‘something’ (vs. ‘nothing’), which means that we’re still locked within the language-prison of our conscious thinking mind. But this is okay.
What is needed is not to transcend language, as some of the mystics suggested, to dissolve away into a realm of pure image and then non-image, to shut the mind off altogether and somehow absorb down into the realm of pure being (everythingness), but to embrace language as a tool to transcendence, a ritual just like his Nepenthe, an access-point whose slipperiness, like a Zen koan, can be used to abut against the pressing reality that does not want to be identified—or, to say it better, that desperately wants to be identified, but that we resist slipping towards, because we stay pinned down, like a bug in a tack, desperately trying to stay with the ‘meaning’ of the word, which doesn’t appear fully not because the word is meaningless, but because we think the word points to the real thing, the concept itself, denotationally, instead of ritualistically, transcendently, connotationally.
The word is a slide, a portal, and ‘everything’ has no logical denotation that can be held in conscious thinking mind and analyzed to reveal the true definition of the seemingly empty space below conscious awareness. It is merely a slide, a symbol, a wormhole that may or may not suck you in, if you let it. Perhaps another word will do. Words, then, are trap doors to parallel universes and triggers for the unconscious to arise—or, better said, to break open the conscious barriers, the cellar-doors at the bottom of your awareness, like flinging open the storm doors in a hurricane, to allow the whateverness to seep up. The everythingness. And as it seeps up, there is nothing you can ‘do’ with your normal thinking conscious analytical conceptual mind to ‘understand’ or grasp that which rises up. All you can do is stay away, sit down, relax and otherwise occupy yourself. This is why the best and clearest concepts always arise either when you are distracted or falling asleep. The blur of the conscious mind, whether via drugs, or exercise, or hypnagogia dissolves away the obstacles that block out the everythingness.
We compartmentalize reality in our normal waking conscious minds to survive—consciousness is an evolutionary tool that helped us find nuts. It is not, per se, a tool of transcendence, other than in its ability to recursively slide itself out of the way and allow what’s underneath to flood up, like rain water from a storm drain. There is a thinking mind, then, that is a friend of the unconscious, and this is the mind that reads these words, and writes these words, and slides out of the way. It is a conduit, a surfboard, because the unconscious everythingness cannot reveal itself, because it already is. [This is what is meant by ‘eternal’—not infinite time, but beyond time and space, is-ness itself. The unconscious everything and eternal are the same expression. But I digress.] The unconscious everything rides on the symbiotic life raft of subconsciousness, your deepest and subtlest conscious thought-awarenesses, to ride up into conscious awareness. Nay, that conception isn’t quite right. The unconscious everything does not ride up into conscious awareness, because that implies that our normal thinking consciousness then ‘absorbs’ or ‘possesses’ or ‘understands’ it. No, that’s not it.
The unconscious everything rides up via the commensal vector of the deepest subconscious, the fish hook that we allow to dangle down into it that it bites onto — it is like a barnacle on a whale’s back — to send a fragment of itself, an isomorphic part that represents the whole—all aspects of the unconscious everything not only fractally imply the whole but are the whole—up into the organism, like a file upload, and this file does not get parsed by the mainframe but actually installs itself into a space on the hard drive, replacing whatever is there.
This is the key thought: we don’t do anything, it installs itself. It fills us up, bit by bit, atom by atom, and the more we fish and allow bits of the everything to come up into us, it replaces our biological mortal cells with its own eternal DNA, and so, then, we gradually become more and more it, until eventually all our cells are it, which they always were anyway, and so this ‘return’, this replacement in space-time by the everything, is merely a shadow recollection, a pantomimed ritual, representing what already was and is, and so all we are doing when we cast our lures into the fathomless sea and patiently wait for the everything to bite and then creep up our line (we do not reel it up, it reels itself up) is celebrating, and remembering, what we already are, like an adult playing a child in a play, they do not forget they are an adult even while they are enjoying the re-enacted experience of their own development, there is always a part of the mind that is clear.
