Gone friends

 I missed my friend’s memorial service. I figured I’d watch the streaming video but for some reason the stream wasn’t flowing when expected. I can’t say why I didn’t plan to go to the in person event except I have got in the habit of going to virtual funerals and memorial services and out of the habit of getting on the G train to go be with an audience. I was unhappy with myself when the video didn’t stream and wished I was with my friends, remembering our friend with them. What is wrong with me? The recording of the memorial was available the next day and I watched the whole thing but the night before I felt like one of the disciples who was supposed to keep watch at Gethsemane, dozing off instead of watching. Watching what?

I want to watch now and tell you what I see now, radiating out of the emptiness of bare awareness, one hopes, from the soft machinery in the skull. Laboring in this warm glow I retrieve words from my vocabulary and put them together in a net as big as my life, wrapped around my life. Is there a dimension where everything is possible and upon this rock of infinity our world constructs itself as we construct ourselves and our world?

Too oracular. These are from notes I wrote this week. I’m looking for something to begin that I can finish and read in class tonight. I already started something last week but when I read it now it sounded false as if whoever wrote it was prevaricating, whatever that means. Evading.

It is a word game. Arrange words following rules of grammar established by human community, by convention. The words have meaning and individual sentences make sense and might be true, but if they are true when separate, when conjoined they contradict, they speak against each other.

So it goes.

So what goes?

What is it and where does it go and from whence or whatever? 

Are you going to get to the point?

When is he getting to the point?

I can’t say there is a point on this twisted line of thought that is THE point. As I type my mind is jumping like a cat chasing a laser in circles on the floor and up a wall and doing a back flip. My mind is like this only much slower, doing its slow motion brain flip in the ether of thought, like a goldfish in honey. 

When you finally let go you are not lost you are home.

You are already home, someone argues.

Emptiness, emptiness, running on empty, standing on emptiness, falling into emptiness.

Bring the doctrine of emptiness home, someone suggests, where its always been.

It was her 63rd birthday. She was almost 57 when she died. I’m doing the math. The abstractions about the existence and non-existence of a self come home to where they belong — an empty home.

The grain of wheat that breaks open isn’t the body, someone argues. It is the reified self, the thingified self, an object of ignorance, they say, the self synthesized by the network of brain functions they call the Default Mode Network. Interference with that hardware could result in a loss of self. Drugs, brain damage, traumatic brain injury, or natural, god-given mental illness, unstable brain chemistry, can interfere with the hardware and the work of the soft machine.

She had a natural god-given mental illness, a bipolar disorder, and sometimes was not herself and at worst became so lost in a nihilist void she would sit here all day, every day, imagining blades cutting wrists. She had made a few attempts before we got together and approached the edge of self annihilation, if that is truly possible.

When you finally let go you won’t be lost, you’ll be home and you are already home, I hypothesize. This is when, in eternity, the non-existence of a god as a reified self, god as a thing, constructed by the default mode network, out of what we were taught or found out on our own about reality, a hologram of a god, is enshrined in the radiant electric emptiness of your mind.

Meditate on this your archetypal deity, the book of natural liberation by hearing advises, not as a thing that has an inherent essence, but like the reflection of the moon in water. Do not meditate on this god as a solid corporeal form! we are advised.