Staging Area

This staging area might spawn work that ends up on other Infogami sites, or at Disenchanted.com. All of it's Public Domain.

Zen

Zen is knowing all the universe is one, and it means its opposite is what we call duality, which is believing that the universe is divided into entities that are wholly separate from each other. To be enlightened means to perceive the truth of Zen intuitively, when it no longer takes effort to remind yourself that you, and the chair you sit in, and the table you sit at, and the multi-septillions of tons of matter filling the universe are all a single, inseparable entity.

The hardest part of becoming enlightened is to unlearn everything you've been taught to take for granted. It hasn't got anything to do with shaving your head and wearing saffron robes, and there are things you can do in your modern, electrically supplemented life to get closer to it.

When you're next infected with a cold, know that the virus invading your body cells is probably a very very very distant cousin. Viruses work by injecting their genome--made of DNA or RNA--into a cell. Any cell that decides to start interpreting this new material is soon to be in a heap of trouble, but the only way it could understand the virus's genome and act on it is if that genome was comprised with the same language that your genome is. DNA and RNA encodings aren't arbitrary and aren't likely to coincide if they sprung from separate acts of abiogenesis. At some point, a long time ago, we split from a common ancestor. You and the disease that infects you are members of the same extended family.

When you have a chance to, shut the fuck up. Never miss a good opportunity to listen. Talking to someone reinforces the dualistic idea that the other person is not you. This is false. The universe is deterministic, which means everything that happens had a cause. Every thought a person has is a product of experiences and genetic patterns so numerous and subtle that they can't be duplicated, but also can't be separated. You're likely to experience some of the same events, and share very close manifestations of the same genetic patterns of someone else, and so you share an overlap of some degree with every thinking being on the planet. Like the "Six degrees of separation" idea, you're only a short chain of experiences or patterns connected to any thought that has ever flickered through any mind. Listening to someone is the best way to absorb a product of these thoughts and increase the overlap ever more.

When you see someone, look at them properly. They're you, but extruded through different axis of experience and genetic combination. They seem to be separate from you because they don't respond like another one of your limbs when you wish they'd do something. But you do actually communicate impulses to them on a thousand subconscious, non-verbal levels. And they respond in as many imperceptible ways. The consciousness which has formed the opinion "I am me, and they are someone else" is just a pattern that formed without the knowledge of the thousand ways that you do interact with them.

Think about the moments when time has been elastic. The seconds before a car accident, when time slows down. The hours that vanish when you're having fun. The strange feeling that a party you celebrated years ago is remembered "as if it were yesterday". Time has survived all attempts to traverse it backwards for a very good reason: it doesn't really exist. You can't travel through time any more than you can travel into the letter 'M'. Causality is the cause of the illusion of time; every action is caused by the universe being in whatever state makes that action happen. But the universe is completely still. Nothing is moving. Everything is silent. Whatever state the universe is in, it must imply another state the universe could be in. A universe with a match in mid-strike on the side of a matchbox implies a universe where the match has caught fire, and it also implies a universe where the match is still in its box. This is time.

Finally, if time is an illusion, then so must be space and distance. Think of the arbitrary menial tasks prisoners were made to do to keep them busy in jail. One task was to turn the crank on a box with a counter that counted the number of times the crank had been turned. To eat breakfast you had to turn the crank a thousand times. To earn lunch you had to turn it ten thousand times. As long as the rule was applied consistently every prisoner was the same "distance" away from their meals, and the system was called fair. To get from your seat to the fridge may be twenty feet, which means you have to first cross one foot, and then another foot, and then another foot, until you've counted to twenty and you can reach the fridge door. You can imagine this "distance" as an arbitrary, but consistent task you have to conquer to bring two things together. Space and distance, as we know it, exist because in universes where it does exist, mechanisms are possible that will eventually give rise to patterns of consciousness that are capable of being annoyed by how far they must go to get a snack.

Illusions of duality are all about you. They're convincing because they are consistent, and because they're visceral to the kind of mind which you were born to have. Any consistent system of rules will give birth to a kind of reality, but while the purest of those is mathematics, the dirtiest is human judgement. Knowing Zen means suspending that judgement, so with it can go the distorted reality that keeps you from enlightenment.

My work

last updated 2 years ago # edit history

The material here is Public Domain.