An Example of Apophasis

It just is, we haven’t been able to get any further than that. We look to patterns to define experience in terms of patterns but we haven’t been able to zoom out to glimpse a context beyond them except a great unbeing. This experience has no context, according to experience it just comes right out of nowhere. You can talk about the constituent parts all you want, they have their contexts in each other, they fit in with the laws of nature and we distill ideas about how all the separate appearances dance together, but the whole dance of everything? Where is that exactly?

Place requires context, we can’t put the whole of existence in a context outside of itself without also considering whatever else there is as part of the whole of existence. And good god, trying to explain this? We. Are. Here. We don’t need to explain our existence to be here, and I think that is a most numinous gift. Think on that and you may find a new gladness.

The past does not exist. The future does not exist. There is only appearance, trying to explain how appearance happens through appearances we notice and catalogue doesn’t really explain the why of appearance, at best how our minds absorb and process information, but not the origin of information, or the quanta or energy or anything else about the dance. We cannot explain the most fundamental of fundamentals, what IS this appearance? If we can only really examine something, decipher it, describe it through sensation, how do we capture this something when it isn’t conjuring an illusion?

We don’t, because we can’t. It isn’t anything but the sensation. There is no object behind the appearance, the appearance is all there is. The appearance of objects it may be, but what ARE those objects besides our experiences of them? Nothing. So the Buddha was right.

What is experience other than experience? What are things touched, seen and heard other than touching, seeing and hearing? What is the THING that we touch, see or hear outside of touching, seeing, or hearing? Nothing. None of this exists.

Electrons, quanta, I know we know about them but it’s only through sense experience, something that knowing everything there is to know about quantum mechanics will not bring us closer to defining as anything other than exactly what it is. We will never have a better example of experience than here,

The definition of a thing is that it’s there, look at it, it’s a thing doing a thing, but what IS that other than what it is? The underpinnings aren’t quanta because they’re the thing too, we’re trying to find out what THEY are too, it’s all the same completed puzzle right here in front of our eyes, WHAT is ANYTHING other than

Either we define existence as a tautology, or at least by finding other names for the same thing, or we look outside of it for something about what it is. Except it’s impossible to look outside of existence. That undefinable, imperceptible… IT is imperceptible, it appears to be nothing at all.

We’re always trying to get at this something causing experiences, we can’t point to any experience as the cause of experience, that’s just another experience, the cause of experience is nothing apparently (literally, apparently, you can believe whatever you want about the nothing but a Buddhist would be satisfied at that) so nothing is the source of something, something is the only reason we can define nothing, they are one in a very strange way, the one, the Dharmakaya, the Buddha nature.

There is some structure in my mind which, running on sugars and other nutrients, assembles words meanings together. Most of the time this voice fits with the bigger narrative I have about myself, sometimes though, running on the right fuel, it might break away from the narrative and take on an entirely new shape and voice, one that is me but isn’t my ego. Fiery anointing, channeling, contact with the logos, this is the mind speaking totally from the present, uninhibited, purely as itself exactly as it is. Then you realize that even when it holds to the narrative, tows the line…