Form & Void
‘Form is void, void is form.’
Heart Sutra
‘The self is the void.’
Ribhu Gita 10.20
To believe in the future is nothing more than believing in an idea, just as the past is an idea, right now. And even the present is only because of belief in the past and the future. It too is nothing more than an idea. How thin is this line between past and future? So thin it doesn’t exist? Isn’t the future when the present is recognised to be the past? Yet it’s still now. Now doesn’t exist so much as an invisible line between past and future but rather seems to move as a time-dependent window on the timeless, which, if its timeframe is removed, will be seen to be exactly the timeless.
What is time but a superimposed idea that doesn’t refer to anything but relative change between objects. Night comes, therefore the time has changed from the day. Spring comes, therefore the time has changed from the winter. But what has actually changed? Change is a change in appearance of what has not changed. Time and space are imputations upon it, ultimately derived from what is called the mind, itself an idea to explain the origin of the ideas it appears to have, so not explaining anything because it is a closed loop. Beyond time, beyond space, beyond the mind – with beyond actually meaningless since there is nothing to be beyond although in words there may be some sense of meaning as a temporary device – nothing changes, there is nothing to change. Even the appearance of change is not actually what the appearance is of. Change doesn’t even make sense in appearance. Although we have to pay it lip service if we want to involve it in our discussion as a means to move on from it. We have to say it looks as if things are changing, all the time. We live in a world of changes. It is only on examining change that it starts to seem untenable, and so too time, and objects, and the world.
There isn’t anything in the world that doesn’t change. People talk of the unchanging as the polar opposite of the changing, but actually as an idea it doesn’t refer to anything in the world, because quite simply everything in the world changes.
The unchanging is not in the world. Rather it is that in which the world moves. So the direct noticing of the unchanging is remarkable because it is not in the world. It calls into question whether there is a world, whether there has ever been a world, what exactly we are calling the world.
A thing is a cut-out from the fabric of the whole that is assigned an arbitrary name and form. A thing is a mental superimposition with no correlate in reality. Even the idea of the whole is a thing – a boundary line on the boundless.
Does time exist?
Take the analogy of the chimes of a clock, striking say midnight. You know every chime is exactly the same, but there is something unfathomably deep about the chime happening now such that the memory of the chime that came before it and the anticipation of the chime that will come after it simply cannot be put side by side with it.
The reason is because only the chime of the present moment is real. That is what reality is like, it is right here now. The chime of the past moment was real when it was the current moment, but the past chime in the current moment can only be created in imagination. In the same way, we create a world based on memories of who we suppose ourselves to be and live in this illusion.
Even the notion of successive moments is only a mental reconstruction. What we are calling the present moment does not in fact share a boundary line with a supposed past and future moment. This is simply the mind’s impression, which does not exist in reality. Still, the present chime compared with past and future chimes is directly emblematic of what we mean by reality. In experience this means that we only truly live now, and that this now is without succession from before to after, rather it stays now without time at all. It continues without continuing because it never starts or ends. It is being, it is not becoming. Becoming, what you might grow into, what experiences you might have, where you have come from and how you have developed and where you are going – is all a fantasy you are calling your life instead of realising you are. Just being, not being anything in particular, is without the hindrances imposed by the mental reconstruction of a life in time. Even the idea of a re-construction implies there was something before now, as opposed to time itself and its timeline being entirely reliant on the objectification of now to create other times that memory tells us we lived and history tells us existed before we were born.
You created your parents in seeming to be born. You were never born. Time and space were born when you seemed to be born. There was no pre-existent world that you arrived in. Your genetic heritage extending back into the fathomless past was born with you if you were born. You were not born. Your existence in time and space seems real, very real, because you are real, the unborn one. The one who was born into the world in the form of a human being exists in thought alone, conditioned by the waking state just as a dream figure is by the dream state.
The quality of realness that we ascribe to the world, the universe, people, yourself, myself, is as it were on loan from what is actually none of those things. Though I feel ‘I am’, and that apparently takes place in time and space, in actuality the only I that I am, for as much as ‘I’ remains a useful word, is formless, changeless, spaceless, and timeless, an I that nothing happens to because it is not an object to have anything happen to. In the mind, however, it looks as if I identified with and then proceeded to reify an entity, myself as object, separate from a world as its environment. But this never left the mind.
It was not I who was born into this world of mental objects with myself as their subject, which would just be another object as nexus of all other objects, including other people for that is what I would be if this had happened, an object, with everything including them external to myself and enclosed within boundaries of their own, as I would be, if this had happened. But this never happened, I remain unchanged, without the time and space that the mind, ever nonexistent, insists upon to assert its own existence, ploughing its own furrow in its own projected world with its own projected body interacting with other projected bodies that are only its own bodies too perceived as other as if there are other minds too as opposed to only the idea of mind, for ever singular, not that it matters whether it is singular or plural when it doesn’t exist as one or many but only the idea of such.
Circumstances will always change. In reality there is only one true circumstance: this. But it is not really a circumstance in that it cannot be circumscribed in any way. It is regarding it as something that makes it into a circumstance. It is because it cannot be fixed as anything that it has to change, change into a new and different circumstance. But these separate circumstances judged to be different one from another don’t really exist, since where one ends and another begins cannot be ascertained as there is no boundary between them. They are only moments of judging them to be one way or another, and even then these moments have no beginning or end. There is only belief that this is what something is, when in fact there isn’t even something. Yet it seems to be, because we believe it to be, when all there is is our own being, without circumstance save the circumstance of being at all, which, being nothing in particular, isn’t anything. Yet it is, and that is all one can say about it: it is, I am, with no distinction between it and I, only the being of nothing at all in the appearance of everything. I am, but I am nothing to be, as all things are.
Changing circumstances are the appearance of the unchanging, which can be said to change from itself to itself and so is not actually changing, only appearing to change because transitory states are seemingly fixed and objectified as different from each other along an imposed timeline, even though on examination this is clearly impossible. The unchanging itself, not being an object, cannot change, but appears to change when subjected to arbitrary division of its continuum via the projection of an objective world onto a field of light and sound and other sensory phenomena that seems to exhibit differentiable pattern. Because one circumstance, however we may define it, appears to be different from another circumstance, the human entity seemingly experiencing them is beholden to circumstance; it is dependent on what appears to be happening, when actually nothing is happening because there is nothing to change except mind-imposed ideas. Yet, because appearances are invested in as actualities by the virtual observer or person, what we call circumstances change cyclically as if real and having an effect, continuously flowing between polar opposites where each needs the other to be objectively defined, up/down, day/night, happy/sad. This is the model of relativism whereby virtualities are programmed into the system and duality subsumes the reality that belongs to nonduality, shining by borrowed light. The person is unaware he or she is a mask of the absolute and falls into time.
Every circumstance is defined by the mind; it is not inherently anything. All circumstances are projected by the mind. This is obviously true of emotional states that depart from equanimity, but it is also true of such seeming constants as night and day. When you are asleep what are night and day, where is the world? Yet when you awake, it may suddenly be night or day, winter or summer, and you naturally take these circumstances to be actual, yet everything has been projected into existence there and then, even the memory of yesterday, and all manner of details that come with the sense that they have existed before. This room, not some other unknown room. It does not occur to us that the very sense of familiarity itself is because this is all myself, and had it appeared very different from what I remember of yesterday there would be a familiarity about that too, just as there is in a dream. For all yesterday is ingrained into today it cannot be reliably regarded as ever having existed. It is cut off. It is a seemingly reasonable supposition that there was a yesterday and it isn’t just an implanted memory in a world you have awoken to for the first time, but it is a supposition nonetheless. From the point of view of conventional living it is natural to suppose you have awoken to a life you have had since your birth into this world, but in actuality this is supplied information and nothing you truly know. All you know is that you exist. You are conscious of being. The rest is created from memory, which is solely in the mind, as is the world created with it for it to be the memory of. And so too the person outwardly facing it, whose world and memories these are, now supposed to be the one who exists, as opposed to the formlessness over which these recollections of form play. Memory is a particular type of imagination that begins from the unchallenged assumption that there was a former time, by which is implied that time exists, and there is a sequence of time in which one finds oneself, when time as such does not exist. Memory of what happened previously is simply the mechanism of the illusion that something is happening now. But it is easy to cling to these memories, indeed it is natural, when the alternative is a void one is not yet ready to look into that can only appear to be something to be kept at bay, at least until death. One takes on one’s memories by the burden of duty one calls life. Actually, one is unborn and formless, beyond space and time, unchanging to these changes of night and day, winter and summer, sleeping, dreaming, and waking. But why does it appear this way, and not that way, one may well ask, legitimately wondering about the way it looks and thereby one’s lot compared with that of others. Clearly if it is going to appear any particular way, then it will have to appear some way or other, and that way will then be the way it appears, and not some other, which in itself will change in time. The only answer to why this way and not that way is because it appears some way. If it doesn’t appear any particular way, which is to say the way it appears doesn’t particularly matter, then it hasn’t been made into a circumstance. It could be any circumstance, and so no circumstance at all, because it isn’t impinging, it is not creating you in the situation. The clock has not been ticking so many years since your birth, so many months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes, tick-tock going on relentlessly in another day awoken to. If that is not you, you are just as you always are, the formless unchanging presence. Otherwise, you are pulled out of the peaceful contentment of oblivion and into the turmoil of space-time and the world, where you are now born, a second ago, though conventionally you time it to an origin point of conception, a stay in your mother’s womb, and plead ignorance of anything before, accepting it rather too easily as an inexplicable existential fog. That’s should you even care to give it any attention now there are competing concerns such as your well-being and livelihood in this waking situation you have conjured into existence and believe in despite the bleary-eyed traces of another apparent situation that you also believed in just moments before, but, with the evidence of waking, choose to regard as just a dream, since the dream you have awoken to seems more stubbornly real and you forget that so did what you now know was definitely a dream, because all of these dreams rest lightly, though seemingly heavily in them, on the reality of what you actually are.
If the general circumstance of being at all wasn’t twisted into the particular circumstance of being some way or other to someone and on into the process of becoming, then one would be free of karma, since karma belongs only to individual circumstances mistakenly regarded as real. Karma, the supposed determinant of the difference between our lives as a result of our actions in this and previous states of existence, deciding also our fate in future existences, is responsibility assigned to someone who isn’t there. But if you are convinced you are there then it sticks like an oil slick dragging down a poor cormorant. You don’t have to believe in many lives since this undisputed one is more than enough to convey being trapped in the cycle of birth and death. There is no advantage in not believing in reincarnation if you believe in incarnation without even questioning it. If this has happened once it can clearly happen many times or eternally recur. The question is though, has it happened even once?
Reincarnation is senseless, especially on its own terms, because if your next life is determined by your past actions then what is responsible for your very first life? It never happened, like this life (even to sidestep the first life – the first cause – and say the whole thing is beginningless, as if it came out of a mist, tacitly admits it never began). One life or many lives, it makes no difference, it’s the same illusion.
One hears the theory that karma has a lag effect, as the sails of a windmill keep turning a little while after the wind has dropped, some karmic momentum still remaining to explain this last life not fully over, despite seeing through it. Yet on what can a prior influence act when objects are realised to be unreal? Equally, what is a prior influence without any objective means to define it nor the time in which it is supposed to exist? Ordinary causality is also dead in the water for the same reason. The end of cyclic existence is that it never began; that life is lived in the mind, there is where the mill still turns. The children’s question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, the plant or the seed, simply exposes the absurdity of what we’re taking to be real.
What it looks like is not real, rather what is looking like that is real.
‘Life seems so real.’ – That’s because what makes it seem real is real.
The unchanging is what’s been there all your life. The background of every experience, every state of mind, every revelation, every confusion, every joy, every sadness, everything that comes and goes.
Apparent action is spontaneous, having no cause. The concept of cause is added in the wake of apparent effects, as if one could even define a starting point and an end point of any particular cause and effect. There is no such thing as an outcome because it is just a further changing situation. Seeming events are arbitrarily defined stages in a field of continuous change that cannot be so crudely divided into discrete events without admitting that it is a mental overlay only. All apparent causes in any case have the prior cause that the universe appears to exist; all defined causes have a cause of the cause, and can never be disentangled from prior causes that have to be followed all the way back to the birth of the universe, which never actually happened. Cause has only ever been an appearance, starting with the cause of the universe, an idea which disseminates itself out to the myriad supposed daily causes that go unchallenged so long as one thinks the universe exists and therefore must have had a cause. While believing in causation one must suppose that there was, say, a big bang and a cause of that prior to it, assuming there was time then. For most this seems to be easier to regard as true than that the universe spontaneously appeared in the sudden consciousness that you are. Now you are you need somewhere to be. It is not as if you weren’t before you realised you are, just that it wasn’t an object of attention. In fact, you’d have to be, before you knew you were. Otherwise, how would you come to know it? The question is what you were, because you are still that, despite thinking yourself something else in the consciousness that you are. And is this not when time itself began? Before time there was no before. Formless unmanifestation appeared to bring manifest form into being, but actually that hasn’t happened, this is still formless unmanifestation with an overlay of mental form, taking the form of a populated world, an immense universe, all within the consciousness that you are. Because you are, the universe is. It had no existence before you became aware of your own existence. But you were before, before there was a universe, before you knew you were, before these objects of knowledge, before there was the idea of before. The universe is not the condition for you to exist, rather you are the condition for the universe to exist. Without you, there is no universe. To believe, as many do, that the universe was here before you were born, is a powerful consensual illusion regarded so much as a given that it is rarely seriously examined. In the absence of illusion, you are the formless nothingness and only by proxy the formed everythingness, which is like a dream and without cause. What has not actually happened can never be said to have a cause because it hasn’t happened. The ultimate cause and effect have never separated. We may ask what is responsible for the appearance of the universe, or the origin of the formless aware void behind it, but this is a singularity which means there is nothing else, nothing to compare it to, it is not even an object to be compared. It simply ‘is’, without before and after, and not even ‘being’ despite the simple sense that it obviously ‘is’. It is beyond being and nonbeing. One can only say that objects ‘are’, and they don’t even exist, so this language to describe them is wanting. By singularity, although rightly negating plurality, a singular object is not meant, but rather a totality where all sense breaks down on trying to approach it in language. The singularity is before space-time, but there was no time ‘then’. The only way space-time makes any sense is if space-time never happened. And this is now, not then. Before time began there was no time – when was that? Always now. The temporary manifestation of a world, a universe, and beings seemingly in it, is simply what it may look like right now, should one favour the idea that it looks like something, that it is something to look like anything. Obviously, this is an unstable situation. A universe of dimensionally limited space-time could collapse into hyperdimensionality any moment. Whatever laws of physics it has could simply end. It is certainly miraculous that it appears to have had considerable stability so far, at least in the belief in time, despite the fact that it is disappearing every moment just as it is appearing over and over again and it is only an illusion that it has any lasting solidity. But the real canvas of its existence is the unchanging formlessness, upon which these impressions of a universe are formed. If one has no certainty about that, it is very easy to objectify oneself as this born body and its attendant mind and lose oneself in a similarly objectified world. As soon as one objectifies oneself one must also simultaneously objectify a world in which to be; one cannot be an object in nonobjective space. The creation of space, by which is meant three-dimensional space, is a mental manifestation to accommodate objects, along with time to ensure their duration. Even then, objects erode, corrode, fall to ruins, get built up again, only the empty space of them remaining because that is from the first moment nothing more than a clean grid of dimensions, having no actual existence, closest in fact to the original formlessness in which space-time has not yet been drawn.
Of course, time-bound language like this is only accounting for a time-bound illusion. In reality, it is describing something that never happened, but which appeared to, in time.
The word reality implies illusion, but in reality there is no illusion and so by the same token nor is there reality, because there is no longer any comparison to uphold. Yet reality is clearly that by which appearances are seen to be false. And what exactly is nonduality if there is no duality? Isn’t it a distinction without a basis? Similarly, nonexistence can’t be named without existence. They’re both superimpositions of language and neither applies. Even the term nonobjective is in explicit reference to objects, which do not exist. In reality the term is redundant, it is only used to counter an implicit belief in objects.
The concept of one that isn’t the other, no matter what it may be, is the disguised concept of division. One can only divide imagined things. Words such as these attempt an escalation of understanding beyond them, beyond the point at which they can only break down because their meaning is inherently tied to a mind that has defined them in a relative objective world, which cannot penetrate the absolute but can undermine its own existence. But even this is only in appearance, actually no mind exists to undermine. Beyond the mind there never was a mind, nor words. Beyond the mind is an idea in the mind. Beyond the mind there is no alive or dead to be. Before and after exist only in the mind, with all of time and space. Language is in the mind. What language can we use to speak of what is beyond the mind? How can I have knowledge of that which is beyond knowledge? There is nothing for language to refer to when the object of thought is no more. What language has in mind has come to an end.
The world’s dependence on objects is reflected in the word objective coming to mean the unbiased truth without subjective colour, rather than the inherently false due to the mental imposition of subject-object duality. While everything in the final analysis is actually subjective – here not meaning personal but from the side of consciousness – this is still in reference to the mind’s division.
Realists affirm the independent existence of the object. Idealists affirm the priority of the subject. Thus both are in the mind and dealing with the dualistic division from opposite ends. Idealism is only redefining matter in any case, albeit radically.
Only verbally can one divide the subject from its object; it cannot actually be done. And so neither exists.
The absolute only exists because of the relative. But this would make absolute a relative term. All you can say is that there is only the absolute – nonsensical because absolute implies relative – or that there is neither the absolute nor the relative, as both are just ideas. But the idea of the absolute points to the real nonobjective absolute, whereas the idea of the relative points to the unreal relativism of apparent objects. Of course, the ideas of real and unreal present the same problem, but it does not need to be dealt with twice. Nonetheless, real points to the nonobjective formless changeless spaceless timeless reality impervious to the mind, whereas unreal points to the world of changing forms temporarily stable as nameable objects in conceptual space-time.
If the world didn’t change there wouldn’t be a world.
What are things void of? Intrinsic existence, that is existence belonging to the thing in itself as if there were a thing in itself with its own indwelling being inhering in it. All things are empty of self-existence. Objects, in fact, are free of their own existence because they are void. It turns out that this is the best way for objects ‘to be’, actually the only way. And what do we mean by ‘exist’? We mean an object.
If some state is seen as better than some other state then there is still identification with states, ie with what can only change.
Changing and unchanging are referring to the same reality. Instead of saying the changing is an appearance of the unchanging, one could say that the changing does not change, it only appears to. Change is always in reference to relative states of objective superimpositions (or superimposed objectifications). Where there are no objects, there is no change. There is nothing to change. The perception of ‘everything’ is a belief about what does not consist of things, technically ‘nothing’, but not nothing as the something called nothing, which is only a further idea or mental object.
Absolute nonobjective nothing, rather than relative objective nothing (the opposed object of the object ‘everything’), ‘is’ the actuality without being anything to be that, and so deeper and deeper still the actuality, untouchable and unfindable by the objectifying mind. Yet this void is immediately present behind that which seeks to contact it, present that is to itself, beyond itself as an object of knowledge or some thing to be known. The mind cannot easily parse such a nothing, imagining blackness or blankness, inert, dead, without intelligence, all immediately confounded by the colourful lively ever-changing universe that this nothing cannot help but appear to be, for that is its very intelligence on display. Misapprehension of this void withholds reality from it and instead hands it to the world, to the everything, which has no reality apart from its nothingness. The universe sits unreal in the void, though still we may speak of a butterfly sunning itself on a rock. Fragile and transient, it is not its own reality it speaks of, but rather what allowed it to be in all its momentariness, namely the unchanging void, unchanging no matter what changing phenomena appear as a proof of its presence for all that presence recedes as objects come to the fore and seem themselves to be claiming the reality. The actual reality is the nothingness that supports the display of these objects but into and out of which they are for ever sinking and arising as if with a reality of their own but which is only their portion washing over them and away in their emergence and disappearance, as if the surface is broken by their awkward and clumsy boundaries, ensuring their death and breakdown rotting back into it. Yet these objects never left that void, they never separated from it, they are still that void without boundary, their objectness and thereby their separation only ever a mental overlay. In this, the surface of the visible world, the everythingness of its objects, is as it were the skin of the depths of the void without any objects, and without indeed a skin, just pure void once the world the mind supplies as a mental image dissolves into the suchness of what it actually is. The mind’s world, all we call the world, has always been the inmate of an illusion. The world instead is the flux of transiency, with no-one to have concerns about its lack of stability, no-one piling up empty dreams on its shifting sands. Rather everything is what one is, understood as nothing. Never born, never dying, pretending for a while in play that, at times, seems too real; remembering perhaps in the extremity of despair the lost identity of the ever-present formless one. More than remembering, which is only pulling objects from the mind, coming in touch again with the unchanging self that has no world of concerns, no objects to be tended as the dreary curator of one’s life, one step from becoming a mausoleum, only the open void not cold and harsh as imagined but a welcome embrace. And everything has a significance that merely saying it is unreal cannot convey alone, for all no other ultimate conclusion is advanced.
The void is a provisional name for a reality that can’t be pinned down to being or nonbeing. It is the formlessness of form, but without form what is it? All one can say is that it is a perfect adept in assuming any and all forms without being anything in itself, except that.
Spontaneity and inevitability are exactly the same.
Choice and predetermination are synonyms. Choice is little more than ruling out what isn’t going to happen.
Freedom to act is often curtailed by inhibition. True freedom is freedom from the need to act.
Doing something and doing nothing both refer to an objective entity. In nonobjective reality there is nothing that can be called action or nonaction. The idea that something is happening, or can happen, is based on the observation of relative motion between objects that are supposed to exist. That they can change their positions relative to one another in time and space is regarded as something happening. The idea that there can be agency in what happens supposes that one object among these objects, I, is self-willing and can direct affairs, when actually it is only a mental image among mental images. Of course I can pick up a ball and throw it, and a dog can run after it. The idea that something has happened is dependent entirely on the belief that these objects exist – the ball, somebody to throw it, and the dog to chase after it – when in fact the whole scenario is a mental impression outside of which the notion of something happening is meaningless. So too is the notion that nothing is happening, to be completely accurate, because happening has no sense of its own without the supplied mental objects to which it applies, such that nothing happening is still in reference to that. In other words, discovery of the false obviates the need to define a true position relative to it, and to do so would only create another needless duality. To say there is no such thing as free will, for example, does not require us to accept that therefore everything is fated, since this is still dealing with the question on the same plane rather than going beyond it to where neither position applies because they are only relativities in respect of each other. If one is discovered to be false, the other is automatically so, but more than this the question is discovered to be deeper than the shallow categories allow. Both are only appearances of a reality to which neither can apply, for all it seems to the limited mind that there can be no other options. But even the mind must succumb to acceptance of this indeterminacy before it dissolves into its own inexistence. Even what has been characterised as meaningless cannot be so neatly abstracted without calling into question the meaning of meaning in order to decide the meaning of its absence. Meaning comes from comparison of objects. But it doesn’t matter that all words unravel at this edge, when it is the edge that has been their object all along, or, more precisely, the falling away of the objective nature of this supposed edge, only called an edge out of convenience that is no longer needed if the words themselves are falling into its abyss and any foothold left can only be in imagination. There is something blatant about this exposition, that even now conceals its hand.
Everything is spontaneous. Say you see a stick lying on the ground. You’re free to pick it up, you might think. But if you pick it up, you’re no longer free to ignore it. Similarly, if you resist picking it up, you’re no longer free to pick it up. In the end, you either pick it up or you don’t, and this is how it was always going to be. Whether this is fate or free will is irrelevant, little more than a theory over the appearance of an action, a separate definable action, which in fact cannot be separated from the continuum of apparent happenings wherein nothing is actually happening at all, a shifting kaleidoscope of colour in which ultimately formless forms can be picked up or put down, moved about, as if via the agency of the form of the doer, as formless as its doing. But we say things are happening, things are being done, and then wrestle with the question of predetermination and free will, as if these ideas might apply one way or the other, and the situation we define out of the formlessness is as we have imagined it, you and I doing things in a world, when there is only ever the beingness of oneself as everything, but oneself not being an object and so not among objects, is actually nothing, not even a dualistic counterpart of everything. And this is perfectly evident, sitting on the shore of the reservoir in the sun, pondering whether to pick up a stick and throw it into the water, but instead opening up a plastic bag to take out my notebook, prompting a swan to make a beeline for me in the expectation the rustling bag contains bread. Alas not, and the swan is now long gone as I come to the end of the reflection I wished to record, the water gently lapping as it has been all along.
Spontaneity has no duration. It is the mind that records an accumulation of causally linked objects in past time out of spontaneous objectless appearance now. Objects are just a way of describing it.
Some wonder why they still see the world after seeing the truth. But it is only someone in the world who is seeing the world and there is no reason to identify with that one.
Why so much effort to dispose of a ‘you’ that doesn’t belong to you, that belongs to the state that produced it?
When you wake up, in the original void, a moment later you remember the world. This is the world’s only existence: remembrance. A moment later, it seems as if it is actual, its true nature forgotten.
Forms change their form simply in looking from a different angle, though the mind still maintains what it imagines is the boundary edge of each object in motion through time and space such that it can call it the same thing as it was.
On what basis do we suppose that an object today is the same object as it was yesterday? Purely by mental overlay, which is all the object ever was.
Even yesterday is the mental baggage of today, and today itself is a supposition of duration upon what is never more than the present moment, with the moment having no objective edge to be regarded as a moment of time as opposed to a moment of timelessness, or eternity, of which there is no other moment.
Just as objects cannot be plucked from a mirror, nor can they be removed from the space in which they appear, for all they can moved about in it. This ought to tell us that they are not discrete objects but superimpositions upon a continuum. They are not actually objects if they cannot be detached from the field of their appearance; they are a thought experiment of isolation by boundary.
As objects in a mirror are in the plane of the glass, objects in the world are in the plane of the mind.
We have no problem discerning separate objects in a mirror or a photograph, accepting two-dimensional representations as the same objects seen in the three-dimensional space that is reflected or photographed. Yet the apparently three-dimensional space filled with objects is also a representation, a mental space-time image of the spaceless and timeless without objects. Even physics, with its holographic principle, recognises that the world, in terms of the information needed to describe it, is a hologram.
Isn’t it obvious that the will to exist doesn’t exist? The necessity to be is nonexistent.
Objectification is always total. Objectification cannot be less or more. If there is one object, everything is objects. Everything is the concept of it. And objectification is imagined, obviously so in regard to things you are not directly experiencing, such as an object you recall in another room, the kettle in the kitchen. But even what you are seeing directly is imagined and taken to be objects that are actually there. There’s nothing there. If you cannot shift the sense that what you see is there, it is easy enough to see that without thought there’s nothing beyond the walls, wherever they may appear to come to rest, whether at that white plastered wall over there or that blue wall of the sky out of the window. Anything beyond the bubble of direct experience right now is clearly imagined, because you know straightforwardly that you have to think it into existence, whether stars and planets or other rooms and houses, this town or city and other towns and cities.
When you look at the wall, does the wall tell you it is a wall? When you look at a chair, does the chair say it is a chair? When you look at a tree, does the tree say it is a tree? It is the mind that supplies this information.
You’re always looking at everything there is, even in a small room. Curtains closed, sound of rain outside, this is the entire universe. You are seeing all there is, regardless what you call it. There are no rooms in the void save ones like this constructed as an object. And because it is conceptual anyway it easily incorporates the concept of an unseen rest of it based on memory of having seen photographs of Saturn or cell structure, indeed recalling an outside where cars can be heard splashing up water in the gutter. While a new point of view may show a greater range of projected content and thereby seem to reveal more of the universe, it is always the changeless void you’re looking at. If you void your table the universe will fall like dominoes. Once the inherent existence of one object is eliminated all objects cannot help but collapse, since objectivity itself is destroyed. Yet this collapse is only of a prevailing misapprehension, an assumption that the phenomenon exists in a far more concrete way than it does. A universe measured in light-years and Planck lengths specifically requires that objects be placed in space-time relative to a reference point. Without the thought of objects, what near and far away is there? But reality would appear to support this mode of enquiry even though dividing up the field into separate objects for analysis can offer no insight into the nonobjective singularity itself and is, essentially, interrogating shadows. This does not prevent science from advancing its investigation into the objects thought to be found at these vastly imaginative scales, as if it may one day aid the singularity in discovering how it does what it is doing all the time. The universe of form is, after all, the mirrored historical activity of the suprahistorical formless self. Certainly anywhere to reach has already been reached. We are simply seeing the eternal flash slowed down into time as if prior to itself.
What are the details of time but a history of objects?
The beginning of time is always now. Yet time has not arrived because nothing is starting it.
Reality does not come in parts or pieces. It is always everything it is. Is there any being missing from your being right now?
The distinction between the universal and the particular comes from the imposition of form. Without form, how can such a distinction be maintained? Forms are divided and separate only in the mind.
The idea of the ‘entire’ universe of which ‘we’, the living outposts of the singular consciousness, can see only a part is merely making room for further imagination beyond what is already imagined.
There is nothing either to exist or to not exist. We can talk about being, so long as it isn’t anything to be or not be. Being and nonbeing are irrelevant categories, labels of the mind that can only deal with the existence or nonexistence of objects, yet we talk about being because in the light of the knowledge that ‘I am’, consciousness, knowing is being, but being isn’t anything. It is the mistake of objectifying ourselves that leads us to feel we are something – a body-mind, a human being – and thereby to anticipate no longer being because those things die. I am, but I am not an objective entity in an objective world; I am what is appearing as all of that, the void. The void cannot be said to be, because it is nothing. But nor can it be said not to be, because it appears as everything. Only what is beyond category could fall so easily into both – I am nothing, I am everything – yet it has led to the certainty that one is, accompanied by the knowledge that that will one day cease. This is solely the result of objectifying oneself in time, dreaming a life in the mental imagery of remembered time. Yet the very intelligence and detail this life exhibits comes from the void without time. So this void, though it may seem alien, has given you everything of your familiarity with what you suppose you know.
There is no ‘being and nothingness’, there is only being that is nothingness.
Only objects are required to be real or unreal. A cup and a unicorn. That neither is real is the other level of the argument. But what we mean by real then is also an object. Though reality is nonobjective, what can reality be if it is not an object?
Thought is always crumbling away at the edge of its own precipice. The thought that thought has persisted for years is only this moment’s transiency of thought in nothingness. It collapses like a line drawn on water without the thought of ‘I’ to string it together with the previous thought and the next thought keeping thought alive to live the life of a fiction curating its concerns.
The perniciousness of thought has to be undermined relentlessly such that it always engulfs itself and never has more of a thread to hang by than the present solitary thought, with the notion of being able to isolate a single thought as anything at all a feeble nonsense unable to sustain itself. What appears to be thought is actually an absence of thought mistakenly drawn into considering itself.
Thought that occurred to me sitting in a tree at the reservoirs in the pouring rain, watching it pound the surface of the water, umbrella held like a roof by the branches: ‘The sadness is in a dream.’
When a flood wrecks a town, next day swans sail its streets as if nothing has happened.
Nothing ever happens. There are no things to have happen. The comparisons by which we may conclude that things are happening are based on the separation of the same from the same under the impression they are different. This situation has changed from that situation, but only on the basis that they are particular situations, that they could be bounded, one from the other. Any comparison is in any case functionally dependent on the idea that memory is actually of a former situation. Even that there is such a thing as a previous situation is held by the mind, which has created before and after and imposed it on a timeless now as if there were a progression from the past that can be interpreted as the same thing changing. The idea of causation itself relies on the principle that a sustainable identity of object can be passed to successive moments. That, indeed, there are successive moments, let alone persisting objects. We are very dependent on ideas we cannot prove even to make the most basic statements about what we regard as happening. In actuality, it doesn’t amount to anything more than a redistribution of imaginary objects as if watched through imaginary time and space. So long as the existence of space-time is not doubted, it will be populated by objects, and things will seem to be happening. People on a forced march through the film frames of their lives projected into motion.
Is now happening? Beginningless and endless, and yet visualised as a point between the vast past and future, is it a moment or all time? It contracts infinitesimally small and expands to the outer reaches of for ever. Now is unbounded. There is no other time to be. But happening refers to a relativism of apparent motion. Actually there is no motion and nothing is happening, because without boundary there is nothing to move relative to another thing. Happening is appearance only, confined to time, a mere now that has not yet shaken off the seriality of its instants.
There isn’t any such thing as absolute motion. Motion is relative. Only objects move. There are none. Motion is an impression of contrasts changing coordinates in respect of each other. There is no actual motion, for all the river of time appears to rush over the present moment, carrying entities identified with the chain of circumstance oblivious of the stillness.
Stillness can’t be separated from movement. There is no difference.
The seeming separation of objects is actually drawing attention to the absence of separation.
On return to one’s true otherless self – outside of the projection of a world with its self and others – there is the realisation that one never left. There is no coming and going save in relative existence and then only mental boundaries are moving. Only opposites (light and dark, big and small, wet and dry, and so on) and the outlines they impose are separating a singular phenomenon of multiple categorisable textures into name and form as supposedly self-existent objects, animate or inanimate. Sentience is also divided into separate beings, even though it is clearly formless and all-pervading.
As opposites depend on each other, how can there be either?
The void is not in itself real, because it is not an object. It is nothing to be real. Real can only look for objects. This means there is no reality because reality itself can only be conceived as an object. But while objects are thought to exist, we can talk about reality. We say that reality does not belong to objects, but we are not yet having to deal with the idea that reality in itself is an object. The void is the reality in that it shows the unreality of objects, but it does not claim any reality for itself and is nothing in itself. This is only the last comparison before comparison ceases and reality and illusion are words that have nothing to apply to any longer. The void then is everything without that being anything either. The distinction between nothing and everything can no longer be made. There isn’t an everything to be nothing nor a nothing to be everything. The words have no objects to apply to. Without objects, there is nothing to hold any difference, yet this does not prevent the projection of a world of different objects. This in fact is the only way for there to be a world. A world that actually exists cannot exist; only a world that does not exist can appear to exist. And because only objects can appear real, a world of objects can appear real. The deeper reality is that the concept of reality is mistaken. It is not a loss of reality to lose reality, it is a loss of the illusion of reality. Reality and illusion are lost together, and this is what we would have called reality. What we would have called illusion is the universe, now a nonobjective field, a void into which objects can still be projected but which are no longer regarded as real in themselves. Everything is an appearance, but there is nothing for it to be an appearance of, save the void. But absolute nothingness does not have any kind of substantiality as a substratum, for all it appears as the nonobjective foundation of the objective world. But clearly such a foundation is only conceiving the nonobjective objectively for the sake of grounding the unreal objective world in the reality of the void.
Objects, considered real, must derive their reality from somewhere. Equally, objects considered unreal must relinquish any former supposed reality to reality elsewhere. While there appear to be objects, their reality or lack of it is the only thing that can be considered. When there are no objects, there is nothing either to have reality or lack it. Objects find their reality in not being objects and at the same time lose their reality because they are nothing in themselves to be real. This is their suchness. For example, the suchness of trees and cherry blossom, which is when they have lost their objective nature to the void and are seen as they are, as absolutely wondrous, rather than habitual mental images hardly taken in. The nothingness of everything enables everything to be everything because it is nothing. If nothing were something it couldn’t be everything, and if everything were not nothing there wouldn’t be anything.
Absolute nothingness is not an objectless space apart from the self. Rather it is my own nothingness. I am the self that is nothing. I am the absence of an I that is something, the presence of aware nothingness. Thereby, I am everything, as much as everything is anything. Everything as that self is completely real; everything as other than that self is utter illusion. In reality, there is no distinction to make.
Form is an assumption about the formless. Nothing happens in the formless save an appearance of forms changing (or changes forming), which isn’t actually happening to the formless so in reality isn’t happening at all. Nothing can happen to the formless.
The existence of things is solely my own existence, which is nothing objective and so not even an existence as such. But that hardly matters since what is called its existence or their existence or my existence is self-evidently so, for all it is nothing to be and inclusive of everything erroneously thought to be it; not one thing nor many things, no thing, yet no less me or the universe as interchangeable names of the formlessness that I am and it is. That there was some difference and then no difference between myself and the universe harks back to an objective structure that has collapsed leaving what is, this right here, without its formerly imposed boundaries, which were always a mental overlay. What this is is neither myself nor the universe; this identity of objects is not needed and is only appeasing an old understanding. To say ‘I am the universe’ is talking about two things that don’t exist.
In the realisation of the formless void or nonobjective nothing it is simply that the hard-edged defining lines of objectivity vanish. There is no longer and never was some person me experiencing some world he imagined he was born into, going about his activities on one of many planets. Rather this me and all others and this planet and all others were and are imaginary projections of form out of a nonobjective formless nothing that is self-aware but not as anything, invisible and unlocated, only temporarily observing human life in a dream of becoming conscious of oneself. Who knows why these forms appear from nowhere, but true to form they disappear without resolving it. What never was must take its explanation with it. The question should not be what was its meaning, but did it have a strange beauty. In any case, it will all go and not be remembered, save that living now is remembering it.
You’re the void looking at itself without eyes.
If the absolute was not already aware, for all it was unaware of it, how could it have suddenly become conscious that it is, that ‘I am’? As a result it is objectified as something to be and a world appears to an entity that has become conscious of its own existence. The nonobjective absolute, however, is unchanged by all that seems to have happened. Nothing has happened to it. It is nothing that can have anything happen to it. The absolute is as it was before space-time exploded into existence, as it still is without before and still is in the absence of time and its words for ordering events and portraying their continuance. Space-time is in the consciousness of being. Consciousness is an arising in awareness. Nondual awareness is inconceivable. It is prior to the arising of the ‘I am’, so it has no ‘I am aware’ to alert itself to itself, but it lacks nothing by that absence since an I to be aware and an I to be aware of is dualistic separation blind to its own absurdity.
So ultimately the absolute appears to learn of its own existence from an illusion, once the idea of a conscious being in the world is seen to have been a fiction from the beginning. But the absolute itself is nothing to be, for all it is everything that appears to be. The dream of consciousness can stay, or go as it surely will in time, and it makes no difference whether it is sooner or later because nothing has actually happened. The absolute, oblivious of its own awareness except in this long dream, could have an infinity of realistic dreams in which to seemingly ponder itself without ever succumbing to change, neither birth nor destruction. The absolute is in nirvana, and to come out is to dream. But it never really leaves, it only seems to. Then it is seen, in a moment of awakening from the dream of being human, that the world never was, only figments clustered, birth and death in those, time and space in those. I am the formless ocean of intelligence, the inexplicable hyperdimensional singularity, momentarily living the appearance of a human life, profound in implication, since this illusion now has that reality.
Can reality have been revealed by an illusion? The question falls into the silence like the clang of a loud bell: What illusion?
There is no illusion at all. The separation into reality and illusion is illusion.
The suchness of apparent things have the quality of their own inexistence as an ineffable radiance.
Reflecting on the death of a friend – It’s a curious thing living out one’s life in the void, you don’t even realise you’re ‘there’. Then death blares out its noisy trumpet, and you remember a thousand sleepless nights, long dark nights of the soul, separations, partings, loss, disappointment, and you remember absconding from it a long time ago, then just a brief taste of death, and belief in death and dying, and all those things one wanted to do, once, wanted to be, once, which will soon fade again like an echo that for a brief moment persuades it will sustain itself, reverberating in the chasm of forgotten hopes, but it fades, and one wonders, what was that? That world that flashed so briefly like lightning illuminating the wall in a darkened room.
The irony is that I spent most of my life chasing flashes of enlightenment, but when you have a flash of ‘the world’ it dawns on you that you hadn’t even realised that it had thoroughly disappeared. You only thought it was still there.
The bird singing loudly outside my window at 3:30 in the morning has the right idea. What else is there but a few melodious notes pealed off into the empty night?
The idea of nothing prior to everything is clearly an objectification of nothing in a timeline that belongs solely to everything.
It is only with the conceptual invention of space and time as the ambient dimensionality supporting the extension of objects that everything seems to have its existence. But nothing wasn’t prior to everything such that it gave rise to it, rather it is a simultaneity. In any case, nothingness and everythingness are not different or separate; their reciprocal relationship is purely explanatory. Nothing and everything are two ways of looking at a singularity that has no origin at all. Nonobjectively, it is perfection, but objectively it can only appear perplexing.
Form and formlessness depict an unreal distinction impossible to make.
Form is an orphaned representation. Formlessness can’t be represented.
Change can be quantified only by defining separate objects out of the changeless objectless background, thereby making the changing seem something different from the unchanging, and indeed the foreground from the background. In reality, it is a singularity that is neither changing nor unchanging, both being only points of view, but that it is unchanging is its essential nature and that it is changing is its apparent nature. In a sense, though, the idea of the unchanging also implies an object. What doesn’t have any form at all can’t be said to be changing or unchanging. If it were changing it would have to be from one thing to another. But there are no things. If it were unchanging it would have to stay as it is. But it isn’t anything to stay the same. The unchanging is the living void, unborn to the world of things. It is the reality that hosts all seemings, all supposed changing objects. It is no distance away. It is this that hears the wind rustling the leaves of the tree, and when that sound passes on, it remains, unchanged.
Anything in time is changing. Anything changing is in time. The unchanging is not in time even though it seems to imply time because it is only through time that you could verify that it was not in fact changing. But this is only an objectified unchanging. By unchanging is meant the nonobjective reality. It is unchanging because there is nothing to change, so its unchangingness does not need to be observed throughout time. There is nothing to remain as it is or change. Yet clearly it is that which is not changing while everything in the world changes. Anything changing is doing so in imagination along with the time it takes. The changing doesn’t actually exist.
Anything in time is unreal.
Only objects are in time.
The unchanging is not experienced, it is the ground of experience. All experience is of the passing. Experiences vanish like a morning mist. The most feverish, the most ecstatic, all have become the same, without reality. Neither memory nor imagination can resuscitate them. One may wonder, what is the use of having felt anything at all? Are we mere collectors of a range? Do we need experiences to convince us we lived?
Reality is not an experience. Experiences come and go. Experiences change. Experiences are all relative. Experiences are in time.
Events and conditions and states, all changing, are the stuff of experience. To experience is to objectify. Experience means division. An experience is an object of an experiencer, which is the subject. This subject-object relationship then becomes an object to a further subject, and so on in an infinite regression of subjects never escaping objectivity. Crystallisation into objects is total squeezing out the seemingly nonobjective ‘final’ subject until the observer has nothing to observe and in the observing is nominal only. It might seem as if observing itself were an object, but only to a subject shimmering into disappearance being pushed out of the dualistic crudity of mind-mediated perception. And without a subject, are there actually objects? Subject and object are conceptual only. Formlessness has no subject or object. Observing has nothing to observe but observing itself. Observing is what one is, not what one is doing. Language is the ultimate infinite regression, for all it can suggest what lies beyond and ensure it remains at issue in the active mind, which is always lapsing into its own empty mental world, as if that is where you live. Having created the world, the mind cannot just accept it as unreal. You have to withdraw the mind from the world yourself. If you’re always engrossed in it how will you discover that the world is just as unreal as a dream? Was the world ever seen without the mind, does it exist by itself? Is the world conscious of its existence, or is it you conscious of your own? There is no existence that is not consciousness. Existence without consciousness is imagining things exist without you to perceive them, whereas actually objects are empty and it is your own presence that is being highlighted by what you take to be a world. Existence cast off onto projected objects is attributed existence, not existence itself. Existence itself is consciousness of being. Existence you are not conscious of is no existence at all. Your own existence is not a mere existence, it is that by which everything exists and it is that existence of which you are conscious.
Being means that without you none of this is. Being is knowing. Before I know ‘I am’ there is nothing to be or know. This is right now with the mind set aside. The idea of ‘before I know it’ only comes after I know it. The activity of the mind with its pressure to believe in its world never actually subsumes reality, which is ever-present and untouched.
Without the mind’s prompting, the absolute does not know it is. Without consciousness, the absolute is not conscious of itself, for all that it obviously ‘is’ before becoming conscious of itself as existing. But this knowledge is already in time and so false.
The concept of a prior state before time began is in the illusion of time. Time begins with consciousness of being, but only objects of being – things to be – are in time. Consciousness of being is confounded with an object when one says ‘I am’, but that by which I am able say I am is formless and not an object. Consciousness is originally void.
Prior to beingness, prior to consciousness, is prior to the current moment of belief in time, rather than prior to the imaginary time of human birth in the past. It has been the so-called prior state of timelessness all along, as opposed to there being a pristine state locked away in an unknowable unmanifestation before being born. The absolute is not elsewhere in time but directly timelessly here.
Time cannot actually have a beginning as you need time already for that.
Even as time appears to continue, the timeless stands apart, unborn, changeless, the reality of that appearance dreaming time and its changes. Time is in the illusion of the world, or, rather, the world is in the illusion of time.
That being came from nonbeing, or that everything came from nothing, is a crude time-based way of putting it. Being and nonbeing – as a contrasted and thereby objectified pair – are only ideas. The mind cannot grasp the nature of being and nonbeing without evoking the further idea of before and after to account for it, as if being came from and will end up as nonbeing, as if a brief span of temporal existence is my existence. Being of course refers to the straightforward sense that ‘I am’, but it is not the particular human entity that is, that only dates from birth. Rather it is the underlying sense of being that is not in time, the nameless eternal presence. Being is objectified by time into its imitation, becoming, otherwise being is time. Any I that was born into time must naturally seem to have come from nothing, beyond the origin stories of genetic history which themselves must trace back to nothing. Did I then come from nothing? It must seem so as long as I keep time and an impression of myself as existing in it, because it is hard in time to realise that I didn’t come from anywhere as I am not the one who came, I am not the human being, I was already here when that came, whether I knew it at the time or not I know it now, I neither come nor go, which happen only in time. Without time to posit some prior state, nothing and everything are effectively simultaneous and have ‘not yet’ been differentiated. In other words, now is the prior state and any subsequent state is in the imagination where time is born to account for a distinction that the mind cannot comprehend as simultaneous, because nothing and everything objectified can only be different and therefore existing at different times, even though ‘before time’ is a contradiction in terms as time is needed to conceptualise a time before it. Before time is really now without then, without past, present, and future, because time does not actually exist. What is everything but the projection of forms into the formless light? And what is nothing but the absence of any boundaries? We may say that everything came from nothing, meaning being came from nonbeing, but we cannot say it until time itself has been created in which to visualise a progression. Is this time real? But even supposing time to be real, which it is not, how can something ever come from nothing? Clearly it is the notion of thingness that is in error. It is not so much that nothing and everything are the same, since that would imply identity of objects, but rather that there is nothing to be different in actuality, only apparently so in the concepts that are forming the world. So when we talk of everything coming from nothing it should never be regarded as at some point in an imagined distant past, but rather as right now, should one happen to concretise forms as if they have their own existence instead of seeing that their inexistence is actually what they are.
How can everything come from nothing? It never did. This is still nothing.
Being has no objects. This actually means being is void and is in itself beyond ‘being and nonbeing’.
The world of duality is repelled by the nondual reality like oil in water leaving it stranded in its own conceptual layer simply not applying but nonetheless colouring and shaping everything. It comes to constitute reality even though it is its own creation in attempting to grasp the real. The world is going on in a thin mental film.
The suchness of things – that electric blue dragonfly perched on a twig, that seagull gliding over in the vast sky – is made possible by my own presence outside the cycles of time lending itself to these apparitions in such a way as to render them marvels. They are only illusions if believed to be real in themselves. Their existence is void but their suchness denies the reification of their nonexistence, which would just be nihilism.
Once you understand there is nothing here, not even ‘you’, you can just watch the leaves drifting down from the trees all day long.
Quite apart from formless beingness, the conceptual opposites ‘being and nonbeing’ are tokens of thought and have no existence. All they would have to refer to in any case would be the present experience imagined as circumscribed by time that begins and ends. One cannot even say that being and nonbeing are the same, because this is meaningless, and not just in the obvious sense that it is pointless to conflate antonyms. To say they are the same is to employ a misnomer because there is no being and nonbeing to be the same, they are only ideas both equally incorrect and referring only to themselves and each other.
The only fact about the present experience, whether regarded as phenomenon or noumenon, appearance or reality, duality or nonduality, is that it is a singularity without implying oneness or a single object. Seemingly opposite ways of looking at it do not so much absorb each other as if they act in concert but rather refer only to ideas about it aimed at elucidating what to words and concepts can only seem its contradictory nature. The singularity itself, if we may talk in this way, doesn’t appear to have any interest at all in understanding itself, despite these forays into the nature of reality, and even deep journeying into illusion, suggesting otherwise. It is nothing to have to explain itself. It only seems to need explaining if it appears to be something. This cannot be understood. But it is the saving grace of worlds, innumerable worlds, and hells and heavens. It is a benign intelligence that is entirely who anyone and everyone is, but ultimately no-one. It has no form so we say it is formless; there is nothing to change so we say it is changeless. It seems to make its appearance through changing forms, but this is not its reality, only the sign that it is there. I have been saying ‘it’, but I could equally well say ‘I’, or it could. That it is an intelligence is self-evident through the forms it appears in, but even intelligence is only an appearance. It is beyond being anything that might apply, but obviously is on familiar terms with everything that could apply and its negation. It can transform itself into anything without ever being that, yet there is nothing else that can be that. Its own essence is formless and changeless, even while appearing in different forms constantly changing. Ultimately even formlessness and changelessness are only ideas to contrast their opposites, but with the advantage of existing nowhere in the world as pure qualities, and as relativisms they apply to nothing. Though they are mere ideas, they are nonetheless intended to point to that without qualities, not even these qualities. If the formless were something in itself there would have to be a form for it. The unchanging covers itself over with change and eludes discovery. Even formlessness and changelessness are shrugged off, but for now they will do as words to trace the traceless.
We have only one word that applies to the fact that a singular intelligence appears to exist that is oneself, the universe, and absolutely nothing: miracle. Beyond that, supposing this was a word that could be got beyond, we would have to say it was absurd. But then we would be in a territory that is meaningless, because absurd compared to what? There is nothing else to compare it to. There are no rules for it from elsewhere; it makes its own rules in as much as sense may be discerned for a while before changing. Even the laws of physics are temporary, and temporary means could end now. The wonder is that there is any perceivable stability at all, but it will not last nor does it need to last because nothing is actually happening or changing, this is only an impression. Anything I suppose it to be, it is not. So we are left with the fact of it, as evidenced in the simple experience of seeming to be alive, though we cannot say how that may differ from seeming to be dead, which is not important and only a detail, since the primary fact is consciousness of being, regardless of form. And what is formless cannot be destroyed. The singularity is impervious to the destruction of worlds. It doesn’t even need to be, ‘to be’. Nor can it become anything it isn’t already. It is complete for all it is unfolding aeons and showing brief glimpses of lives in time. It glances over itself through the observation windows of our lives, its presence mostly going unnoticed, which means by itself, since us noticing it is it noticing itself. Clearly just prior to it noticing itself it was right there in the midst of life, it was not an unmanifestation akin to oblivion, rather just unconsciousness of the fact that it was it that was conscious in the guise of myself. It is me, I am not it, I don’t even exist except as a form of words.
There is no-one hearing the car go past and the early morning crow cawing. Awareness, but no-one who is aware. Just space. ‘Someone’ begins in thought. It is almost as if one’s presence is an afterthought of an awareness that is perfectly aware of everything but hardly notices that it is.
Awareness unaware of itself is actually the case while one thinks one is a person, without need of visualising an impossible-to-reach cloud of unknowing at a vast distance from ordinary life. It is inseparably us.
Being is essentially a negation of the idea of transition, one thing turning into another, such as firewood into ashes. There was no firewood beyond the idea of it. When that idea was no longer applicable, the idea of ashes took over. One did not change into the other. If firewood is, it must always be, so how can it turn into ashes? The process of burning, the magician’s cloak behind which the trick of supposed metamorphosis is accomplished, simply points out that it is impossible for one object to become another without destroying the boundaries created by the very objectivity that supposes that first there is a pile of firewood and then later a pile of ashes, and that one became the other. It is clear, therefore, that firewood, ashes, and the process that links them, are all superimpositions of mind and that change and causality are superficial illusions arising from the deeper illusions of separate objects and time passing reconstructed in memory. No object has its own before and after. They are simply what they are in that characterisation of the objective nature of the moment of observation. Transformation not only requires some other moment (thereby objectifying moments), it must conveniently forget that objects are objects during their supposed change from one to the other. The very idea of process in fact negates the objects that imply it is happening.
The concept of an object that changes is the essence of unexamined illusion, because if an object changes it cannot be permanent, but if it is not permanent then what is it that changes? There are no things to change, and if there were things they could not change. For an object to change it must stop being the object it was. If it stops being the object it was then what was that object? Even though only objects can change, it is impossible for an object to change without relinquishing the object it was thought to be, which shows it was never that object, and the idea that everything changes was only ever in imagination.
The belief that things change is false not simply because there are no things to change but also because any things there could possibly be, ie the things falsely believed to be, could not in actual fact change if they were objects as is supposed. Change cannot sustain analysis. Change is an appearance, yet change is not even occurring in the appearance because it depends on defining objects that simply could not change if they were that object, they could only change if they were not that object, in which case what is it that is changing? Even the appearance isn’t showing change.
One cannot say a change has taken place without defining different objects at the beginning and end of the change, but where were those objects when the change was taking place? What is changing once the object that supposedly started changing is gone? We accept that change happens, yet it cannot happen if we suppose it is what it is. However, we needn’t lose our bearings in this curious aspect of illusion, because in the void there is nothing to change or not change, so there is no need to deal with an illusion of change that isn’t even offering a rigorous appearance of change, just a loose semblance so long as it evades scrutiny.
One object changes into another object only in the mind as a superimposition upon what is void of being those things and their supposed change from one to the other.
An acorn could definitely not grow into an oak if an acorn were an acorn and an oak an oak.
Time no longer has any meaning in the negation of process. Being is the antidote to living in time. The time of being is unchanging eternity rather than passing time. This is being time as opposed to being subject to time. Eternity means timelessness rather than infinite time, where the notion of succession has no application. Eternity does not mean everlastingness as that has no substance to apply to. Succession creates the idea of something lasting. Eternal really means transcendence of the need for anything to last because it quite simply is. Only what isn’t needs to last. Lasting is an attribute of objects. Only phantoms last, and then how long?
What limited sense infinity has before breaking out into paradox exists only in an objective framework. Otherwise, an infinity of what? Infinity needs things or at least a thing that fails to complete because it can never reach its boundary (how can the circumference of a circle of infinite radius actually be a straight line when there can never be any such circle?). The truly boundless is nonobjective. Infinity is an objective way of trying to understand it. It is only because there are infinitely many things that there is a thing at all. Infinity comes to represent our inability to grasp what a thing is.
The time of being does not come via the passing of time, rather every moment or flash of time is being. Not that there is any other moment than the present moment, nor that it has any boundary before and after. It does not pass, only an impression passes with time in that. Time does not exist unbounded, that is timelessness. Time is its division along a timeline. The moment, or timeless now, is set free from any need to flow into something else, or to have come from anywhere.
The time of being does not flow from past to future or future to past but rather from present to present. As such, it does not flow at all. Flow is an appearance due to the imagination of some other time than now. But it is always now, even when it appears to be a different now that in the past was thought of as the future, which is merely constructed time, always passing.
When now has no boundary there is no past and future to divide it off from. The present is only fleeting due to the imposed idea. The world is changing in time. The unchanging is timelessly present. The viewport on time is like watching a film. Time and motion lean upon each other and together reify as space-time, creating objective existence from the division of the indivisible.
Although bounded moments appear to flow, they are conspicuously discontinuous. Time is for ever stopping and starting again in objective moments that provide the only existence for the universe. When time stops, the universe vanishes. The flicker of time is smoothly animated into life by the mind. You don’t have to be able to see the frames to understand the principle because the conceptual division of time, which cannot be otherwise, already dictates them.
The mind can only objectify and has created the universe in attempting to fathom itself. It has only its ideas as its reality and cannot conceive of reality beyond them except as unknowable, which it calls absolute reality while continuing to elaborate its relative reality, entirely an appearance. Relative reality is a misnomer. There is nothing relative in reality.
The progression in time is the universe. The unborn presence of the absolute from before time seemed to begin is unchanged and untouched by entification in space-time, which gives rise to everyone who is born of ideas that seem real.
How long is a moment? Supposing for now that there is such a thing as a moment, then it is without duration and it is only the spacing of moments into a sequence that creates what we call time. In other words, time is a spatial arrangement of moments of zero duration.
By treating moments as disconnected and discrete, even though no boundary can be found between them, and imagining indeed that there is more than this moment, which isn’t even circumscribed by itself, the mind is able to create the past and the future, because past and future moments are inaccessible to this moment now and so the mind cannot recognise that this moment was never some other moment and will never stop being this moment. Instead, this moment is situated in an overlaid timeline, effectively making it always passing, even though the moment it is supposed to be, and the moment it came from and the moment it is changing into, cannot be isolated. But with the sense that the nowness can be divided into separate moments a universe can be visualised that is only as real as the plausibility of this division. It is the only factor that allows this imagination to seem real: the objectification of time into discrete moments. Thus the existence of the universe is embedded in an impossibility. So even though it may seem real, even straightforwardly it cannot be real. Whereas what is real is directly so in the timeless void of the present moment, when the universe is recognisably confined to the mind’s conception of space-time.
Forms are inseparable from the space and time they seem to inhabit, so form is space-time and there can be no space-time without form.
As a corollary, the formless has no space-time.
There isn’t any space-time ‘out there’, we’re putting it out there to compare objects.
The universe is formless pure light morphing without genesis.
Light is the only candidate for what we are in what we can directly see, except that light is not seen it is seeing. The photon reflected off the apparently seen object ‘out there’ is annihilated in the seeing leaving the object as an inexistent remnant of mental processing, a world only in the mind, the seeing being the continuous realm of suchness empty of a world of objects.
Although a photon can only be seen once – a single photon can trigger only one photodetection event – I would argue it isn’t even seen once, that the seen wasn’t ever seen as such, that being an after-the-fact mental division of the seeing, and so it was never in that sense an object. There is only seeing, with no-one doing the seeing, even the virtual observer added in afterwards. The physical analysis imposes an order in time, such that the detection of a photon destroys it but what is created is seeing divided into seer and seen, because it assumes the objects, the photon and the detector (the retina of the eye or photomultiplier, for example) are already there. But the undivided seeing is prior. Therefore light has the primacy of the direct presence of reality in the phenomenon, and it is this that is interpreted in the subsequent instant as a world of form lived in by separate entities through division by objectification, without realising it is being mediated entirely by the mind.
The seer doesn’t see. The seer is an idea. There is no agent of seeing. ‘One who sees’ is nonsensical.
We never see objects even in the physical model, just the photons reflected off something apparently there that is inferred, reconstructed by the brain, and then projected outwards as a duplicate object to the place of the supposed actual object where it effectively snaps to its boundary as if it were the object itself, so sure are we that there is one.
Not only is the seer not there, nor the object seen, even the intermediary photons aren’t there, these being the current best guess that accords with the observations. It is the mind that makes a conceptual space-time universe out of the seeing of light.
Light is neither a particle nor a wave. Instead these are two ways of looking to which light apparently conforms. Yet the idea that one can change light by the way one observes it is ridiculous because it assumes that light is something that can be observed at all as opposed to being the observing itself. How can the observer ‘see’ light? The observer is light. When light is made the object, the observer and observed cannot possibly separate without the division rebounding upon itself with an observable anomaly. Physics has now moved on from the stumbling block of wave-particle duality to particles alone, but this advance is bought at the cost of having to retreat to the position of being able to calculate their probability only. Objective particles have already started dissolving. The simpler explanation, nonobjectivity, is not considered, since science remains the study of material objects and is not without practical success for all it is only pushing back the frontiers of our ignorance.
A light-year is the distance said to be travelled by light in an Earth year, almost 6,000,000,000,000 miles. But light does not travel. Only objects move. The instantaneity of starlight in the cosmos at the point of seeing is followed back to its supposed sources from the reference point of the virtual observer and an estimate is given of how long it would take ‘something’ to reach there at the speed of light as a way of describing an immense distance from us, as if light were something to reach us in the same manner. Light has a speed only in an objective universe. In itself it is nothing to move relative to another thing. Distance is in the mind, between projected objects. Light appears to come from somewhere because we think of it as being emitted. We explain that the light of the sun can pass through the intense cold of space without losing its heat because it isn’t converted into heat until it reaches us and interacts with matter, when we feel its warmth on our skin. We add to be complete that empty space doesn’t actually have a temperature unless you put something in it. We’re reluctant to go further and consider that light and heat never left the sun, that we have traced it back into an idea. Belief in emission also accompanies us into the quantum theory of the atom, and could even be said to give rise to it. The electrons in atoms are regarded as existing only in specific orbitals with a set energy level, the lowest being the ground state. When an electron drops from a higher level to a lower level a photon is emitted of an energy commensurate with the gap. This results in a distinctive elemental emission spectrum, the lower the frequency of the light the less the energy and the closer the orbitals, green for the copper atom, orange for sodium, lilac for potassium, crimson for strontium, the flame test of recognisable elements familiar from fireworks and salted water boiling over on the stove to orange the flame. We trace back by objective reasoning from observation the difference between energy levels in the atom just as we do the distance of stars from Earth, inferring an imagined universe in past time from the instantaneous light of consciousness illuminating the void.
It is consciousness that lights up the sun.
The illusion of moving waves gently slides under the tiny feather just bobbing up and down on the surface of the reservoir as if to prove the point that there is no lateral motion here to carry it along.
Sound directly points to the presence of the unchanging, the unborn. Suppose someone strikes a gong right now. You weren’t thinking about gongs but you recognise it straight away, and as the sound of the gong fades what enabled the recognition is unchanged and not going away. Not only that, it was there before the gong was struck, or the gong wouldn’t have been heard, and that is the primordial awareness that is there prior to the world, with the world being in the mind that framed it as a gong. This is not hearing with ears, this is hearing with empty space. Ears belong to the world created to hang the experience on. All sensing mechanisms are created in the division that also simultaneously created the sensed object. It is certainly a mistake to think the sense organs are already sitting there waiting for a sense object to occur. They are instant objects themselves.
Eyes, ears, and other sense organs belong only to the waking state. They are the embedded explanation for being able to see, hear, and so on. In the dream state, your dream character may also have eyes, but are they being used to see? You say it is obviously your eyes that are seeing in the waking state, but can the eyes of a corpse see? It is the light that glints in the eyes of the living that is seeing. A sound may seem to wake you up, but you must have already been awake. A sound from a waking state that has not yet come into existence can’t reach into the prior dream state and fetch you out. Still, alarm clocks give a good appearance of working, such is the keenness of the phenomenon to persuade it is real, even organising wet pavements out of the window as you draw the curtains back, such that you say, ‘It must have rained in the night’. To insist otherwise, that all of this has just come into existence as you entered the waking state just as a dream similarly came complete, seems madness to the conventional consensus view. But you cannot prove that it is not the case.
When I open my eyes, only then is the world-containing space formed. Opening and closing the eyes, nothing happens to the awareness, which does not change with events and shifting sights.
It is hard not to talk about process in a world of process. If I cut my finger, blood wells up, eventually it heals. It seems as if the unchanging nature of the real denies something important in being beyond process. No, it doesn’t deny it, it just denies reality to what it looks like. Process is the reflection of reality in seeming matter, so it can only be separated as illusion and ignored in a denial that carries no weight. Rather the phenomenal extension to a world of form is the all-pervading pure light of the void. This is the light of the nonobjective self, which is the singularity. The self is a stranger to itself in space-time, so it accepts the view of the mind and believes itself to be a limited separate being, a body, until it realises its true nature and shines with a great luminosity, both casting off form and taking its totality as its own.
A process is an unstable object.
Process is instantaneity cast backwards in time as causal explanation.
Understanding is really losing what you think you understand, because if you just keep adding to it you aren’t actually building an understanding but only a prison of ideas. Ultimately, you don’t know a thing.
Obviously the absolute did not spring out of nowhere when it became aware of itself, it was already there. But at that moment time was not, and so there was no prior state of unawareness save that defined in a subsequent illusion.
The memory of your own life includes the memory of the present moment, as that cannot be here in this form without a memory of it having been in this form before. The mind reminds one of the familiarities that make any kind of continuance of a life possible; that is, the life framed by birth and death, two moments no-one ever experiences but everyone lives between with a tenacity of belief hard to credit, were it not an illusion. One’s entire life an illusion, certainly no-one can believe that. Yet the truth has a knack of being obvious once it has stopped being elusive.
It is consciousness of being, being something or other, that manifests the entire universe of shifting shapes, objects of itself as appearances in the place of their absence, placeholders of their emptiness, and thereby their suchness, their just-so-ness, in reality as it is.
That it happened, and that it never happened, is not a dichotomy, because nothing real has happened and what seems to have had something happen to it is unchanged. One does not need to deal with the concept of prior to the universe or prior to being or prior to consciousness because those ideas are in time and there is no actual universe or being or consciousness that has separated from the unmanifest absolute, and the appearance of such is a bubble in which everything is being considered. Beyond is always right here, nothing ever having happened to it.
Reality doesn’t happen. Only dreams happen.
Thought is for ever engulfed by its own inexistence. It seems to preserve its trace just long enough to reach its next instance, and yet entire books emerge into form should one attempt to set down these thoughts, to catch them on the wing as it were, and thought may indeed show its beauty, beyond whether it matters, just as much as it may tie one up in knots of one’s own making. It all depends whether it is an absence speaking, a presence that has already disappeared but not gone anywhere, simply taken up its natural place behind everything. Invisible, formless.
Form essentially comes from making a distinction in nothing.
The idea that there is form creates form. There is no actual form beyond the idea.
Forms are all the same. Form is a singular idea.
Forms can’t be separated from the seeing, so they must actually be the seeing, which is the formless light.
If form is in itself seeing, how can forms be seen?
The reason nothing is happening in reality is because for something to happen one needs real objects, and that is a contradiction in terms. There can be no such thing as a real object. The most that could be said to be happening is a change of pattern, but even that needs a particular pattern to be defined, which is just as much an object as any already familiar object. Even when viewing a particular changing pattern, such as the play of sunlight on the leaves of a tree fluttering in the breeze, is anything actually happening? It is mental imagery as if projected outwards unrecognised as such and instead regarded as an external world, external to the habitual body or sensing instrument taken to be oneself in a world of form. It is only when some pattern is set solid in thought and taken ownership of rather than left to fluctuate as a function of consciousness that there is the sense that something is happening, which essentially means that one stands to gain or lose something solid and tangible, perceiving the body and its things in a relativism such that movement of one relative to another is construed as something happening. Change is all about the movement of fixed edges in respect of other fixed edges, which in any case can only remain fixed by mentally holding them in place momentarily, piling moments on moments to depict change. Yet the very moment of objectively fixing it is anything but change. Change is little more than animation of a series of static moments of remembered difference. We cannot see change, only remember it. A slightly more charred log than the last charred log we recall from before as the fire takes hold. The change we think we see is in the mind.
To say that nothing is happening sounds like a denial of the evidence of the senses, and yet in the aftermath of anything supposedly happening it is immediately consigned to memory where it is little more than an obvious mental image in which quite clearly nothing is happening. There is scarcely even a discernible flux in remembered mental imagery, mostly just the idea that certain things happened. To pin down anything happening right now, rather than just have it as a vague conviction that something is, is an overwhelming work of definition. Colours and shapes have to be extracted from the field of vision and given edges to define them in form as separate named objects, sounds have to be identified as belonging to mentally visualised objects distinct from other objects, similarly with the other senses, and somehow the relation between this sensory data and an entity regarded as myself has to be laid out, and yet usually only in the most simplistic terms (my chair, my house, my money), together with some more diffuse pattern taking into account personal likes and dislikes, cares, responsibilities, goals, motivations, belongings, and personal history as if there were a day prior to this one. What is any of this to do with you? Why live a life in which the destiny of mere objects, none of which actually exist, is the overriding concern?
The sense of ‘mine’ creates a false self that exists only in its feeling of possession. You see the neighbour through the window rudely picking flowers from your garden that you had not thought to possess before. Let it go, ‘not mine’. Think of where you live as little more than an overnight stay. Being alive is a matter of this day alone, right now. Impermanence is wondrous.
The difference between humans and the other animals is the latter’s lack of possessions.
It just so happens that all apparent people appear to believe in the same world, but that there is such a thing as ‘consensus reality’ makes its appeal to myself alone. That people call the same things by the same names in your world is in fact a clue that this seemingly mutual world is actually yours alone and there is no other world than the one you brought into existence with you as a habitat to accommodate the belief in an objective self. This solipsism is not the actuality, however, because it exists solely in the mind. Rather it is pointing out a characteristic of the imagined world, that it will always be in its most reductive form a disguise for solipsism.
If anything is given form it will appear to make coherent sense because form is the sense-making river, even to the extent of appearing immanent in the system. Well it would do, wouldn’t it, because form, any form, makes it so itself.
Progress is an artefact of the memory of a supposed former state, which allows objective comparison, but anything you actually know about that former state is created now. And simple observation shows that all progress there has ever been has crumbled. Even civilisations cannot sustain themselves, their apparent progress is lost to geologic layers and scraps, which, likewise, are unearthed and pieced together now to form an assumption of functioning societies that have proceeded through time and technological innovation, yet have collapsed to dust, as this one will similarly collapse to dust, leaving its fragments floating around the cosmos in dead orbits like so many empty shells washed up on the beach. Progress is the pipe dream of an intelligence that is already all space and time and beyond it, without need of leaving little mementoes of its achievement buried in its shifting sands. Traces of the past aim to persuade that there was a past, its excavation continually being created in the present. Castles in a dream are freshly created looking old. There was no universe before you became aware of it, which means that what has happened in all that time since the big bang is a supplied illusion. Of course the appearance of an ancient universe indicates that you yourself are ancient, but as there is nothing else this is a meaningless consideration. Time does not exist, but clearly if it appears to exist there is history. But to say that I was then as I am now is buying into the pretence of time. Instead, one must concede that there is no universe now, let alone then. Though being, being at all, is clearly a singularity and the universe is certainly an expression of that, particularly the visible magnitude of it when considering ancient light. Although even that has nothing to compare itself with and is only considered vast because people identify themselves as the human body rather than the formlessness in which consciousness of being has allowed the universe to appear. What size is the formless? Size is obviously relative between forms, but even there minuteness has its own vastness the deeper one peers, scale extending into the ever smaller as well as the ever larger. The formless void of all objects of whatever scale has no measurable dimensions, and where in any case does the vast universe exist but in the nothingness in which it is projected.
The appearance is of the ancient but that appearance itself isn’t ancient, it is for ever from just now. That it is consistent in remaining a certain way for ages, even preserved in distinctive fragments as it falls into ruin, is also from just now. Built in, you might say. Whether it is carrying a legitimate impression of the distant past or not becomes a strange question when time does not exist. This is simply the way it appears, as if there were a time when all this happened. Empires did rise and fall, according to the way it looks, the impression it wants to give. The singularity can appear to be anything and is an intelligence alien to the belief in being human but in itself it includes everything and so is nothing other to be alien to anything; on the contrary, it is oneself and entirely familiar once the imaginative flow of Earthly life is a receded daydream.
My grandfather told me as a child that the universe was something that happened a long long time ago and it no longer exists now, except in memory, and this is that vivid recollection.
Both form and formlessness operate to convey meaning only up to the point at which neither are describing anything.
Consciousness is the absolute of the manifest. There isn’t actually any difference between the manifest and the unmanifest, save what seems to be through nonexistent objects.
Differences are all unreal. This includes the difference between the real and the unreal. So long as there are two, they are objects. And one is just waiting for the other.
The manifest is actually the unmanifest given temporary names and forms. The unmanifest seems to go behind as if eclipsed by mind-supplied images that naturally appear real because they rest on the real, but what the images depict is not real. There has actually been no manifestation, no more than had one mused it so. And there never can be any manifestation, although it is miraculous that there appears to be. The phenomenon so easily generates apparent creatures and worlds of such complexity and diverse form it would be plausible to think it intended to, but this would only be creating a god of what far more deeply is uncaused, and, deeper still, hasn’t happened. Clearly, the dimensions of the singularity lie in the nature of the unmanifest, the absolute nothingness that demonstrates intelligence ostensibly to and in itself. If there is a resting place, a ledge in the void, it is to be what one is in all its profound mystery. The human creature apparently experiencing all this is only a fleeting thought of what one is, instantly creating a world in which it may live. This dream of a life is directly the unmanifest absolute, not a mere part nor even the whole as both are just objective imaginings, rather I am this absolute, momentarily dreaming. And of course ‘I’ and ‘am’ are just conventions in the world of my dreaming, actually I cannot be described. I appear to be looking out on the biosphere of planet Earth. At least most of the time. But there is no Earth, nor time and space, nor this universe, nor any parallel universes. It is a convention how I describe it. I could just as well say I sit at the centre of a hyperdimensional construct of which only crude attempts can be made to understand it, none of which are necessary because I am it. Reality is only elsewhere and unfindable when looking with the eyes of a dream.
If one talks about the subject of the object then that subject becomes the object of the subject talking about it. This never-ending regress ought to make it plain that the subject-object division is entirely in the mind. Such an infinite corridor of observers for ever stepping back ceding authority to its next iteration is in itself something viewed. It appears to be a glitch of mental processing, yet without invoking this logical extension it forms the basis of the common way of viewing things. The ultimate subject would be the formless self, but that can’t be called a subject because it has no objects. Subject-object is the language of the mind to describe what is in the mind.
Space-time is not something to be perceived as if it were an external given, but rather is an aspect of perceiving itself. The perceiving puts space-time ‘out there’ to accommodate the perceived phenomena. In other words, space-time is inherent in perceiving and has no existence apart from it. Space-time is a phenomenal extension of what you are but which you are entirely absent from because you are neither subject nor object. And this very absence is your noumenal presence.
You are the noumenal undergoing this experience to realise it, in the process codifying the phenomenal.
I as such do not exist in the absence of conceiving myself. And nor do I need to exist, because this is what ‘I am’. A presence absent to itself.
Though there is no separate self, there is nothing that is not myself.
‘So, what is the computer monitor and that tree outside really made of?’ – This is a mixed-up question in as much as it assumes the computer monitor and tree have an existence to be made of something. One may as well ask whether a car in a dream is made of dream metal.
Nothing is made of anything. There is no objective universe, there is no material substance. Even to say it is made of consciousness one would have to ask what is consciousness made of. Consciousness too is void of being anything. There is no real substrate. Even the word ‘real’ refers back to an unacknowledged object.
There is no material because any material right down to quarks and neutrinos and beyond to what has not yet been discovered is and for ever will be an object postulated upon a substrate that cannot be found as it is nonobjective, void. Even diffuse objects, such as an electron as a probability distribution of its whereabouts, are still objects by virtue of being named and having some form as distinct from another named form, such as a proton. Even if they are seen as processes or events they are still objects because they are distinguished one from another. Even gross objects such as tables and chairs cannot be found as independently existing. If you move a chair across the room you do not leave black space where it was as if it can be definitively detached from the field of its environment. If you remove an object from the table you don’t leave a gaping hole as if you have torn the fabric of the universe, rather where that object was is effortlessly covered over by the continuation of the background. And the object itself always has a surface facing away in a hidden conspiracy with the background that has to be quite plainly imagined to accord the object separateness. Turning the object around never verifies, it only results in another unobservable face in league with the background. It doesn’t matter that you’ve already seen it because that is lost to a previous objectified moment and now relies on the persuasion of memory, which cannot be sufficiently convincing in this regard. If it were a true object you would be able to separate it from its background completely, but it is not possible. This tells you that objectivity is superimposed upon a continuous field that knows no actual boundaries. Objects are always in your consciousness of them.
Heraclitus said: ‘Cold warms up, hot cools down; wet dries, parched dampens.’ Polar opposites seek their balance by moving towards it, but they cannot cancel each other out, rather as one waxes the other wanes and vice-versa, flipping over when full and acquiring back the imbalance on the other side, setting off the cycle again. Not that a cycle has a starting point at the instant of enantiodromic change, that is simply the most striking feature of the ceaseless flow. A change from one to the other cannot even be fixed until it is already its other. Wetness is now dry, but it was drying all along. Day is always turning to night, not just at sunset. The equilibrium of the opposites is the inescapable fulcrum that allows them to be, the void of their motion in stillness.
What exactly would an equilibrium of opposites look like other than what it does look like all the time, the perfect cycle. The perfection is in the maintained equilibrium in apparent motion, not in what the cycle looks like at any particular time, since that could be chaos. Nature spurns that equilibrium, abhorring it like a vacuum, unbalancing it at every opportunity, moving to overthrow it as if with an aversion to settle for all the pull towards it is indomitable. Real equilibrium after all would mean an end to cyclic existence, the death of the universe. Yet there is absolute equilibrium, just not in the universe.
Equilibrium reflected in the universe is behind the perpetual motion of the opposites; it appears to be a completely unstable condition, it walks a tightrope, it never seems able to remain, thrown off at the slightest disturbance. However, to itself equilibrium is the most stable – indeed without any other possibility – because it never leaves itself, only appearances depart. It has a solid gyroscopic stability, it truly abides, whereas even serenity must cycle on to turmoil. Equilibrium is the dynamic active stillness, not the passive stillness for which movement is something else.
A cycle doesn’t begin anywhere.
The duality of opposites is in the nonduality of their equilibrium.
Duality is the method of appearance.
The graceful swirling dance of a drop of ink unfurling itself in a jar of water is a beautiful picture of stillness in motion, if you take a moment to directly observe it. There is no motion, only stillness appearing to move.
Equilibrium is the true unchanging at the heart of the incessant changes and the cycles of the raging ages, it is the eye of the hurricane of the entire system.
Absolute equilibrium is a pounding barrage of lucidity.
The perceiver of objects is a virtual observer viewing from a perspective of particular space-time coordinates as a function of appearance and not a life lived (although it can appear that way). If there is an appearance, it must be appearing to an observer who is collapsed into it as part of the appearance. That it is seamlessly achieved points to its actual nondual nature. Objectivity or everythingness is a map on top of it. The territory remains unknown, because it is in fact unknowable without becoming an object of knowledge. Instead, the true knower, removed from the objectification of the appearance and knowing only itself without division, is the cognising void, the self-aware singularity that is not an entity as such for all its reflection as a person hands it back the world recorded for it by living. Has it a use for this data? Is it studying its own phenomenon unknown to itself as a manifestation of something in its nature to be caught up with in time, an urge to discover and learn about everything? People and their lives are continuously feeding in data, not to mention insects, cephalopods, birds, flowers, trees, cats. Is it idle musing? It doesn’t exactly look idle does it? The entire universe is running the equations of experience. I am a perturbation in the void that has attracted the void’s attention in the illusion of being born life in a dream of passing time. I now am not it, it now is me.
The phenomenon remembers everything, the position of every daisy, the shape of every rock, you don’t have to remember anything.
There is no difference between it being recorded and it being a recording.
There are no fundamental particles, every substratum is void. But there will always be subtle objects of one sort or another to be discovered by the mind that looks for them, even if they have to be chased into higher dimensions in search of their boundaries as name and form. However, a finer and finer granularity of object will never reach nonobjectivity, save that objects may become increasingly incongruous as they dissolve into probabilities only.
There is no such thing as a partless particle. Partless means without boundary, so the partless could not be a particle or occupy space.
The void is not a substratum because it is all the time precisely what everything is.
The universe is not even one second old, for all its appearance contains billions of years.
Now came before 13·8 billion years ago. The idea of a prior instant is in this instant. This is an instantaneous universe extrapolated backwards into its own idea and then supposedly started from there. Yet none of this could have been without this instant.
The universe has come to seem so real it disguises the real that it actually is.
What is a thought exactly? Can you tell when a thought begins, when you’re in the middle of it, and when it has come to an end? Can you even extricate yourself from a thought as the thinker of it or are you just that lingering implication? Is there even any such thing as a thought? What is thought? In the silence of its absence, nothing at all. Even in its presence, with no-one implicated and involved, there is really nothing there. Has this been thought? The sound of the wind rustling the leaves of the trees becomes the end of nothing that was. The gentlest sound that can wipe out all traces of thinking as if thought were something lost in, taking with it the one lost in it. In its ceasing, it never was.
That there is a world at all is dependent on you to know it. Any world existing independent of you is a fantasy. Any world existing before you were apparently born is a fantasy. Any world remaining after you have apparently died is a fantasy. The world, what you call the world, is nothing but you and you alone, but not you as a separate entity that is only a part of the world, you as the formless and unborn.
You were never for a moment away in this dream world.
It is the nature of grace to subside while the cheeks are still wet.
The self is the singularity that this entire system is. That there is a singularity is simply the obvious manifestation of a pure enigma presenting in the first instance as your life in the universe. That the singularity does not have even the simple qualities of existence or being, for all it is undeniably present, is ultimately awareness of oneself as formless and void, and so encompassing everything. Your life is an example. The universe is an example. That they have no actual existence in the light of the void is an example of what is possible in their seeming to be. Once these examples have been assimilated, if one is feeling intrepid the singularity has other examples it can offer to the determined explorer of altered states, such as the shift from limited space-time dimensionality to full-flood hyperspace, which rarely fails to convince that the world is a construct.
There is nothing to actually be real. There is no actual thing to have this reality. When we say that reality is nonobjective it’s correct, but reality isn’t anything. You can only say an object is real or unreal, and there are no real objects, all objects are unreal. But saying an object is unreal assumes that there are objects to say that about, and there aren’t, so one can’t even say that objects are unreal, because there aren’t any. And one cannot say the nonobjective is real either, because it isn’t anything to be real or unreal. The words real and unreal apply only to ideas and are only ideas in themselves. Reality itself, beyond existing or not existing, remains indeterminate. Reality falsifies the apparent without appearing to be anything. And the voidness of objects falsifies their appearance as self-standing separate things existing from their own side. They are dependent projections appearing only in the consciousness that they are, reliant entirely on the consciousness that I am to perceive them. Void of substance and nothing to be, as am I, is nothing then the reality? Certainly not a perceived nothing as that would only be an abstracted object relative to everything. Rather the absolute nothing that everything actually is, that in itself is void of being anything apart from the appearance of everything, is the true void, meaning that now the universe without its false appearance as a universe is actually what the void itself looks like, for all the void isn’t anything in itself. This also removes the false appearance of the void as a conceptual absence, a mere nothing, because its actual absence is its phenomenal presence as the world. Reality therefore is precisely everything as it is in its suchness, meaning its apparent forms are not bounded objects but rather empty formlessness appearing that way. The void releases objects to its own freedom. The suchness of objects is what remains when the object itself, the mind-supplied idea of separation, is subsumed by the void. The rubiness of rubies is not an illusion, and yet there are no rubies.
But how can empty formlessness appear any way, being nothing in itself? Quite so. You see forms and colours where there is nothing. Empty formlessness is simply the actual nature of these forms, which do not need to disappear just because their mode of being has been discovered. On the contrary, the universe is the ‘exteriorisation’ of conceptual thought such that ideas can be manipulated in a dimensional space as if they were actual objects. This could well be regarded as a breakthrough, for all it is now the bane of existence for those who don’t understand it as that and are despairing as a result of thought. Otherwise what it means is that the universe can be used as an experimental testbed for all manner of theories, which, indeed, is how it is being used by science, despite the fact that most scientists regard themselves as investigating a real universe ‘out there’ rather than an ‘externalised’ mental environment for manipulating ideas in the form of physical objects. External, that is, to the human body in the common way of thinking of it; in actuality the nondual void has no internal and external or interior and exterior, and the human body is just as ‘exterior’ as the world it lives in on stepping back as it were into the consciousness that holds the universe. That now practically everyone believes they are living as separate beings in a solid world of objects is QED, proof of concept. It works. These forms are evidence of the powers of projection of the formless intelligence behind them, the immutable living background. Science is a refining principle by which discoveries may be made that improve the projection that people believe they are living in, with improvement being defined as progress or more advanced technology that betters the lot of the world. But the world is void, its suchness mistaken as separate objects. Their objective character is nothing but a superimposition, though that enables one to say this is ivy and that is the tree it is climbing up, so they can be dealt with as different things. This sorting of forms enables prolonged reflection on their properties and testing of one’s ideas in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a mental environment that had not dimensionally extended itself and given rise to life of many different species as varied aspects of the singular life, from which derives also rocks, minerals, planets, stars, and interstellar space. It is the singularity that enables chemistry and physics, it gets rockets off the ground. But it is also pollution, destruction, and death. Of course, as a projection, any of it could in theory be recreated in the void from the stored data of living, as it is every morning after sleep. It is all an objective overlay upon the nonobjective, none of it ever leaving the mind, in its true sense the projected thinking apparatus of the void. It is an active demonstration that the void is not an inert nothingness but a force exhibiting its current contemplations. There is nothing wrong with objective reasoning as far as it goes, it has got a probe to Jupiter. If everything could be explained, there would be no point having a universe. The void has projected a diverse universe in space-time ostensibly to answer a few questions. So the apparent forms are a directly tangible manifestation of what would otherwise remain unknown to itself – that it can do this. The singularity, in its true essence the void, has discovered that it can be a universe, and, still further, hyperspace, as yet hardly explored. And not only that, it can troubleshoot from within. Its presence in a single human being on Earth in the 21st century is its presence in all time and space. That it seemed to forget until now is missing that that could only have been its intention. How could it have occurred otherwise? That it was possibly an unfortunate error to have manifested itself unknown to itself only applies so long as it is still surmising in human form, considering its joys and misfortunes, and so hidden from its own will. Does anything about these forms suggest an absence of intention? Notwithstanding that form inevitably incorporates intention. It may be that the universe was originally an anomaly in the void without intention, an accident, but all the same it reveals the void’s nature, that it can embed intention whether intended or not. Besides which, there is nothing but the anomaly so it is everything that is the case, and so an anomaly compared to what? An accident distinguished from a miracle is what? Though the universe is simply an example and not anything in itself to be too exercised by, nonetheless what it is an example of remains. My life is a dream the void would for ever be destined to awaken from without need of dispensing with its forms because they are its own formlessness. To say this is a realisation is an understatement. Its will is to be. Its saving grace is that it never can be – it voids its potential nightmare. But what an almighty attempt to manifest itself. And so one finds one’s true will is to say ‘yes’ to these examples, thereby retroactively configuring intention, since they are, after all, vivid demonstrations and any creation there might be is now, this instant. While being does not invest in becoming, it can nonetheless discover that it had purpose hidden from itself in the drive towards manifestation it could not have known about in its unknowingness before it spontaneously manifested, and it can subsequently recognise it and claim it as its own. The seeming contradiction between spontaneity and will (assent) is only because they are interpreted in time. Destiny exists only in time. Your life is a destiny. You as a human being have a greater destiny than your creator, who has none, but since your creator is you it cannot be lost and so the whole universe is actually your destiny. You are the inheritor of the ages and the progenitor of time. But unborn, never having fallen into time, what destiny can you have? It hinges there. Do you accept what you have been shown, and say the universe is your will, or do you reject it and say it never was? The problem is taking these forms to be real in themselves, when it is what created them that is the only reality and it’s right here. One cannot help but feel one’s kinship with and love of being that.
We can side with the sages and say the universe has not actually occurred, so no will was involved since it is an illusion, but where can we adequately address that? To address anything we must make use of ‘the illusion’, and thereby give it at least some credit in empowering us to say it doesn’t exist. To deny the universe we have only a universe like this one in which to do so. This is suggestive of a logical fallacy that hopes to make up for itself by insistence. Could it be, therefore, that there is not the slightest bit of difference between the universe and the absolute, that ‘the illusion’ is actually ‘the reality’ waiting to be appreciated in a different manner? But they’re both objective understandings and all you can say is that there is neither illusion nor reality, with the proviso that it is reality that exposes illusion. The universe viewed as a process, taking into account causes and conditions, is the phenomenal manifestation; viewed as a whole beyond causality and the objects it appears to consist of it is the nonobjective timeless absolute. The phenomenon seems something ‘lesser’ in the light of the ultimate truth, almost as if it can be dismissed, yet it cannot help but be deeply mysterious. What we call matter is an enigma, because it is actually the absolute in tangible form. But saying anything is striking a bargain we should at least disown afterwards. We are always faced by the immediate presence of a silence that already says everything. In the meantime, we talk a lot of nonsense, little more than striking stones together in the hope that a bright spark may catch light to the tinder of the enquiring mind, while it still seems to exist. In actuality, there is nothing to be decided. Obviously, it is already decided. It fell as it had to. There is no creator, it is all spontaneous. I am simply seeing it as if I had a choice and exercised it, when I am blissfully happy to see it turned out to be perfection.
The world is the past.
Form is memory.
Even spontaneous creation has to be abandoned. That is simply the most accurate characterisation of appearance. But there are no things so nothing has arisen. What else could arise but things? No things whatsoever exist. To say they gave rise to themselves must first find them and is only acknowledging their presence, which is actually one’s own presence, since they are nothing without that. That didn’t arise.
Everything is potentiality, it can never truly manifest yet it can seem real anyway.
We have no idea what a real world would even look like, we’ve never seen one.
Creation can only ever be an appearance. Reality is not created.
All distinctions are in appearance. Though distinctions can be made, divisions do not exist. In reality there aren’t even distinctions, since the distinction between reality and appearance is entirely in appearance.
How can there be a distinction if a beginning is absurd?
Nonobjectivity has nothing to compare. Comparison is always between objects.
‘I am’ is fundamentally only a memory. But it is at the threshold of actual reality so does not seem something that was that is being remembered, but rather something that is and perpetually so. This is because what enables one to say ‘I am’ is directly present.
There is no ‘I am’ in formlessness. ‘I am’ is the very coming into form.
Forms are known, they don’t know.
To say it is is to objectify it, but to say it is not is also to objectify it, by its absence. In this way, ‘I am’ is a memory of objective existence. If ‘I am’, then there is certainly an objective world in which I can say it. This too is memory projected into tangible form.
You have a body only in your memory of the world.
Within the illusion an imaginary entity, a person, a mask of the absolute the absolute is unaware it wears, vanishes as the absolute realises its own presence, as if unconscious of it before this conscious dream. This world never was, and yet by virtue of it all this can be said. Though the world is evaporating from a dying dream, still it lingers in the air like a perfume as if it wants to be known, briefly and with love. A beautiful world, for all the sorrow. Other worlds will bloom and die. The beauty, though transitory, is nonetheless beauty and perhaps beauty all the more because of its evanescence. Though this is taking something from a dream, as if rescuing a remnant that cannot be, the beauty is in seeing its unwavering origin, fleetingly represented. What is beauty? The attribute of what has gone or the source of what will return?
Even transitory sorrows point to the depths that raise them up, in which one may be moved to call out in despair to some being deemed greater, who is only oneself hidden for a time while one concentrates on changes that seem to have some purpose but have no purpose other than to reveal their source, the still centre of everything.
All of space and time has to be imagined just to establish your only point of contact with it here and now, which is actually the spaceless and timeless.
When we recall an event in our own past it is impossible to remember being present to it in the way that we were present to it at the time, rather we remember a scene that could have happened to anyone, and, in time, all such scenes will be barely distinguishable from things that happened in films or dreams. Presence does not pass to memory because it is never in thought, whereas the thoughts we have about what we imagine is presently happening and which create the events we think we are experiencing easily become the stored content that persuades us we have a past.
Presence is pre-sense, prior to sense objects. It is the unchanging presence, not the changing situation, that is the reality. It is the content that makes it seem we are living a life in time and space, yet this is all dead material without the presence that lives only in the present moment timelessly and spacelessly. You are eternally momentary.
Memory, for all it seems to be offering a picture of events that once happened, is only a thought that seeks to persuade that there was a past. There never was a past. Even if regarded as a present that has now passed, it has to be conceded in the present that the present never passes, the present is always the present. So what is the past that is remembered? First and foremost it is only a thought and there is nothing about this thought to suggest it happened any more than it was just made up now. But of course this gets to the heart of the entire acceptance of illusion and the sense of living as an independent entity in space-time. Does anything ever happen to the unchanging presence? No, things happen only to an illusory entity, otherwise nothing is happening. If these are the happenings that are being remembered, they may as well have been made up now. The presence that allowed them to be, however, is the same presence unchanged from then, allowing for a moment that there was a then for a timeless presence, which is certainly nothing now apart from what it was then, such that then and now themselves have not happened. There are not separate incidences of presence. The events that seem to be remembered were mental then as now, but they are only highlighting the ever-present, such that one can dispense with the thought that shapes an event and take only the presence that allows it to be, which, unlike previous events, is not confined to the past but always present. Looking back at a charming little incident – a crow flew down with a rectangular biscuit in its beak and then proceeded to dunk it in the water at the edge of the reservoir to soften it – the unchanging cognisance of it at the time was no different from that which hears the magpie calling right now in the garden, or the howl of the gale blowing as I read these words back on a still further occasion. What comes and goes is never real in itself, but it is the surface of the real as it appears. The field of named forms is their suchness rather than their individual existence. You see colour and shape where there is nothing, but as suchness it is a true likeness of the void. A pale yellow rose, a clear full moon, though empty, void in their actual nature, still look like that once they have released their objectivisations to the void, and this is their suchness. What it looks like is the void looking like that. There is no other void than the void appearing as it does. Everything is empty, but this means that everything is just as it is. Everything is different from everything else in its uniqueness, but because things are nothing in themselves their suchness is the same. No matter how much the phenomena of the world shift and change, their essential nature never changes. This is the way reality is; it is not elsewhere. The presence that makes the transitory seem real never comes and goes. So memory of a past event is no different from any other kind of thought that temporarily brings images to mind. A life is not proved outside of the present moment, which in fact has no outside. Twenty years ago it was the same present moment, such that one cannot even call it the same as it never ended nor began, there are not two of it to be the same. ‘Same’ just means an identity of objects (which, actually, is nonsense – how can two things be identical?). Only thoughts suggest a life lived that began at birth and will end at death following a sequence of ever-changing circumstances considered to be real for the linking mental event of ‘I’. Unchanging presence is without these kinds of features, formlessly unaffected and immune to time.
The creaking chair, the bird chirping, and the pitter-patter of the rain at the moment is the entire universe, there is nothing beyond it, it doesn’t even make any sense to say ‘beyond it’ because it is not bounded, but obviously to consider distant star systems is to enter imagination right now and does not increase the scale of the present moment, rather only confines it. Similarly, the nowhereness of the location is without recourse to imagining it is situated on Earth.
The extent of the phenomenon is not increased by measuring it in light-years. Its true extent is that there is anything at all. This is the absolute sufficiency that I am, without recourse to form. Presence is never less or more.
The void is not watching you living your life, it is watching itself, momentarily daydreaming.
Does the void ‘exist’? It’s an absurd question, and yet the only question that the phenomenon of the world answers.
Form doesn’t exist apart from void, nor does void exist apart from form. There is no void and there is no form, except this.
The emptiness of appearance can be seen as a perfect blending of form and void. Appearance is the void. The void necessarily appears. Form is relative, void is absolute, but in their union they are indistinguishable.
Saying the world doesn’t exist, true if understood, may be misunderstood as flirting with nihilism, not that this is problematic because it is inevitable that nihilism will present itself as the only way of understanding the nonexistence of objects to the mind that is still objectifying. One can’t always go around saying the world neither exists nor doesn’t exist, and in any case a statement like that has no ambition beyond avoiding the two extremes of positive and negative objectification, ie belief in being and nonbeing. And besides, this is meaningless since there is no being and nonbeing to not be. Even saying the world doesn’t exist assumes there is a world to say that about. It is all untying other people’s knots through taking delivery of language. Silence is a more compact expression. But if one feels one must understand to quell the thoughts, then sometimes it is easier to go to an extreme and come back from it having seen it for what it is, otherwise one doesn’t even know what one is negating. Saying the water in the mirage doesn’t exist is different from saying the mirage doesn’t exist.
The conceptual can always be refined, because it is never quite right. The nonconceptual doesn’t need refining.
There can be no difference between reality and illusion because neither are anything to hold that difference. The difference is in the mind. It is the mind that creates the illusion that requires reality to solve it. Outside of the mind, there is no reality. It is nothing but a concept to address the illusions the mind alone has created.
Emptiness is like the last trace of an object. Without objects, there is nothing for emptiness to refer to. So the irony is that talking about the emptiness of objects is still at least to some degree preserving the notion of objects. Without objects, is there any emptiness? The emptiness of an object is the object.
There is no void without everything. It is everything that is void. There is no void on its own. And yet, there is no everything. Only your own nothingness can grasp what this is.
Everything rests upon its nothingness. The bird singing early in the morning is singing about that.
The void masquerades as changing states; its natural or stateless state is nirvana.
Should we imply the emptiness of the void is actually a fullness pregnant with all possibilities of existence and not at all annihilation? It would be better to realise the void in its own exquisite nature than further labour it with inelegant blemishes on the plane of relativity.
Listening to the rain out the open window late at night, nothingness listening.
The whole world floats on a breath.
It all passes. The formless self remains. Impermanence is only of things.
After working tirelessly all night on my manuscript, as dawn breaks I take off the headphones and listen instead to the birds outside, their voices extraordinarily loud and precise, seeming intended exclusively for me with a message I am halfway certain of deciphering in the elevated and pristine state of awareness in which I find myself. How wonderful it would be to finally understand the language of the birds.
I sit very still for ages, simply not moving, as if in my quiescence I am quite invisible, suspended formlessly in the void of objects all peeled raw of their boundaries and deposited into suchness, everything stock still without any fear of the bubble bursting under the strain of the dynamic tension of absolute perfection, a cogent and sustained almighty eternity laid out before me always there to be savoured in this intensity without twisting out of its equilibrium and back into the mundane affairs of the world, entirely imagined and virtually ceaselessly elaborated without realising none of it is real. At last it seems I have understood in the stillness the language of the highest, the birds closer than I to heaven. It is the omen of After Completion in the Book of Changes: ‘For it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder.’
The formless self isn’t merely without form, it is the self. The self isn’t the person, that has form, a body; it is the self with no form at all. The formless self doesn’t get stuck, it rushes like wind through a thicket of thorns, unsnagged. It is rootless and vital, never away, always here. To the formless self, the person never existed, it is just a mask to show its face to the world, but its original face is shapeless space. The person, believed in for a while, is a usurping ghost one is possessed by.
The formless self certainly resides in the void, the itself of everything and nothing with no it to be. It is consciousness of its own presence, from which it is absent, that is itself.
It truly meets itself only very far out, in its aloneness beyond the falling away of everything, yet is never not here all the time, blending in like a camouflaged moth on tree bark. It is nirvana realising itself beyond time and space, and yet the universe is lodged in a conscious speck of its fractal continuum seemingly condensed into matter but without the slightest distinction in essence.
The continuous effort of the bees on the lavender this hot sunny day would be a waste, were it not suchness at work. How astonishingly beautiful the iridescent metallic green of the greenbottle walking over my hand. The sheer level of detail is too significant to be written off as a mere dream. This is what the void looks like.
The only end is in silence. Peaceful, quiet. Just the breeze in the trees.