A Tear in the Firmament of the Self
A Tear in the Firmament of the Self
The nature of being, spirituality versus religion, and silence versus sound
0.
Towards the end of his life, the Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas had a vision while serving the Mass. What Aquinas saw in his vision we cannot say, because he died without telling anyone what had happened to him. All we know is that he immediately gave up everything he was doing. After a lifetime’s theological inquiry, and a lifetime’s writing, he put down his pen and never picked it up again. He was in the middle of his great work, the Summa Theologiae, but he left it unfinished and just walked away.
I can write no more, he said. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.
All we see is straw. It is as if this life is lived in the centre of a haystack, and we are all longing for the sun that we know beats down on the stubble outside. But all we have here is dimness and dust.
—Paul Kingsnorth, “Die Before You Die”
She said, “Your Highness,
Thomas Aquinas
Have you measured
The depth of the abyss?”I said, “Ms. Gallows,
I have not done so
I cannot climb on
Ladders of mist.”She said, “Your Highness,
Thomas Aquinas
Is God as
Unhappy as we?”I said, “Ms. Gallows,
Our human sorrows
Just like our lives
Are flickering and brief.”“The life hereafter,”
I said with laughter
”Is like the radiance
When a storm cloud lifts.”She said, “Your Highness,
Thomas Aquinas
Wouldn't God die
If death were such a gift?”
—Ian Felice/The Felice Brothers, “Candy Gallows”
I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.
—Mircea Cartarescu, Solenoid
1.
I’ve been emailing back and forth with my writer friend Dawson Eliasen since December of last year. Lengthy, heavy, philosophical, contemplative, and at times deeply personal emails that have greatly enriched my past eight months of life.
In a few recent exchanges, we discussed Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novels, The Morning Star and The Wolves of Eternity, which are the first two books in an ongoing series.
Dawson and I drew the same connection between two of the characters in the novels, a man named Egil in The Morning Star and another referred to only as Papa in The Wolves of Eternity. As Dawson put it: "Papa and Egil are both described as characters that are extremely well read but haven't 'done anything about it.'“ He went on: “It strikes me as a bit of a ridiculous complaint. Reading isn't a means to an end, it's an end in itself.”
Upon reading this, and agreeing with it overall, I was reminded of a passage from The Morning Star (about Egil) that I’d shared in an earlier email, one that, like many things in life, felt important at the time but then passed unnoticed into the ether.
I’d shared the quote initially to summarize the commonalities I saw between the two characters, but ultimately to describe how I both related to them and feared becoming them, in the sense that I was at the time (and am still now) very enticed by the idea of reading more, and perhaps even restructuring my life around reading more, but equally afraid of the idea of writing less or not at all.
Here is Knausgaard describing Egil through the eyes of another character, who takes the connection further by drawing it to his wife’s father:
He was a capable man in many ways, but quite unable to apply himself, and now his aptitude simply lay there with no earthly use, like a field left fallow. Her father had been exactly the same. Just as lackadaisical and as unpurposed. Knew everything, did nothing.
As I write to you now, after several months of very intentional radio silence on my part, my conflict remains, although it's fair to say that it’s there to a slightly lesser degree at the moment, as you would not otherwise be reading this, as I would not otherwise have written and published it. The conflict is essentially: I’ve grown tired of the online world’s noise (this includes my own) and want to pull back from it and live a private and contemplate life, but I still feel the fear of doing nothing.
To reiterate, I am equating "doing nothing" with "not writing" because I can't help but do so, and I would imagine the same is probably true for Knausgaard, though he is a warren of deep and intricate cognition who I won't venture to make firm guesses about. Either way, I think the "doing nothing" versus "doing something" conflict is universal enough to apply to whatever it is that one feels called or driven to do. So while I agree that reading is an end in itself, and a rich and potent one at that, it's the conflict that arises from that understanding—the opportunity cost, for lack of a less depressing and dehumanizing word—that grips me and causes me fear.
But what exactly is that fear?
For me, it manifests in many ways, some of them more valid than others, some of them more subtle than others, and most of them hard to parse. An incomplete list includes the fears: that I'm selfish and useless as a human if I don't contribute something to others; that I'm dangerously without meaning and purpose and connection if I don't focus on making some form of art that cuts through the bullshit that surrounds and inhabits us in pretty much all of our non-artistic endeavors; that I'm already well on my way to succumbing to nihilism, and if I get all the way there I won't know what to do but wait or wish for death; that I'm just being lazy and giving up because I know damn well that I'm a dullard who needs to work twice as hard at least to achieve half as much at most (and I'm tired); that I will become even more of a dullard with zero mental acuity left at all if I don't continue to put pen to paper or involve myself in some other demanding act of artistic creation (but I'm tired); that I will merely fall in line with the many aging and dejected and nostalgic others, gazing longingly at all that we once loved and wanted but gave up on working toward (because we were tired); that I will simply (here comes that nihilism again) lose the will to live and grow dull and angry and bitter and contemptuous toward those who haven't and all that they hope to achieve.
About that last point: I fear as well that it is already happening. My honest assessment is that it is, and that I have some duty to fight it, to take out the killer who’s calling from inside the house. Unfortunately, this creates a companion dilemma: I'm increasingly, though far from completely, convinced that it's unwise to write (publicly) from this state of mind—unless, perhaps, the "goal," as it were, is to elaborate on why I think I've entered it and why I think that's bad. But I also think it might be better to try to fix myself (insofar as that's possible; what I guess I really mean is "it might be better to get myself to a more serviceable condition") before writing and publishing essays than to try to alleviate or validate my brokenness by writing and publishing them. With the latter, I guess I worry that I'm capable of making a compelling case—paradoxically—for doing nothing, succumbing to nihilism, letting it all burn, waitin' around to die, wondering if death will reveal a new reality that holds more meaning than life, and so on. Then again, maybe those are my positions, and I've just not allowed myself to accept them yet.
One way out of this paradox that I've started to see, though, is to simply give my writing a longer gestation period. I think it was Erik Hoel who wrote something about how, by giving your writing this kind of space from which to breathe and grow, you're able to bring different versions of yourself to it:1 the depressed guy with a sense of heaviness, the energized guy with a sense of joy, the well-rested guy with a sense of focus and calm, the exhausted guy with a sense of impatience and and irritation, the cogent guy with a sense of purpose, the absurd guy with a sense of humor, and so on. In theory, this should make better writing, truer writing. And in that sense, maybe all these fears, dilemmas, and paradoxes are there for a good reason. Maybe they are the reason to write. Maybe they are the point, as in, the purpose, but also as in the tip of the spear.
2.
On a walking path at a meditation center in the hills of northern Thailand in June, I decided not to write this essay. An early draft of this essay, that is. One that I’d started writing in my head only minutes earlier. One where I was going to say something about Thomas Aquinas on my way to explaining that I was done with writing, and thank you for your service and all that. It was during breakfast on the ninth or tenth day of a 10-day vipassana retreat. I'd stopped eating breakfast somewhere around day three, though. So after I drank what had become my standard cup of instant coffee, I made my way to the small rectangular path for what had become my standard morning walk. It was there that the sentences started to form, and it was there too that I decided for the umpteenth time not to bother.
A few weeks after returning home from the retreat, and after many months of thinking daily about deleting this newsletter entirely, I landed on a position about writing online that felt workable enough to summarize on my about page for any potential future readers. It was a somewhat unsteady landing, and it remains one, but several more weeks have since passed, and it still feels workable enough to share with you now. It’s actually fairly simple. Rather than thinking of myself as a writer, as such, I’ve started to see myself more for what I am just prior to that identification: a tragically advanced animal with a prison for a mind who sometimes writes.
For well over a decade, I did so far more than sometimes. But these days, I mostly only write online when I can't help myself. And even then, I mostly only do so (1) after I’ve tried to wait it out and (2) if I feel I have something considered to say that cuts through our collective noise rather than adds to it. I otherwise prefer to lead a private and contemplative life. “Speak only if it improves upon the silence," Gandhi said. And, well, it would seem that there is no silence anymore but for that which we create. Maybe it’s always been that way. I don’t know. In any case, as I write this, in the third decade of the third millennium AD, I think making more silence is one of the most radical, righteous, and merciful things a person can do. My default position to writing online moving forward will therefore be one of resistance, one of tension between two opposing forces: making silence and making sound. Whatever else you read from me in this internet abyss will arrive only after having passed through that fortifying barrier.
At the moment, I am committed to this. But whether or not I will remain so I cannot say. My fluctuations are brutal, and it is with that in mind that I can promise you only this: I will do my best to avoid hitting you with any shrapnel.
3.
What struck me around that time, something I’d never thought about before, was that everything Papa concerned himself with was an abstraction. Books, music, ideas, concepts. He had no interest at all in nature or his surroundings. His only physical activity was to go for a walk every day, but only so that he could think without being disturbed, not to exercise. Apart from that all he did was sit in his chair or behind his desk. Everything went on inside his head, that was where he lived his life. That it hadn’t occurred to me before had of course to do with all that abstraction going on inside him, invisible to anyone but himself, whereas what we saw, Mama and I, was him, his physical being and all its various expressions, that was as concrete as things got with him. Only after I’d moved away and he became a voice on the phone did it occur to me at all. Words, sentences, thoughts, opinions—these were things that didn’t exist on their own, only as parts of a system that referred to itself. So when I told him about mycorrhiza, he couldn’t just let it be a phenomenon I was studying and listen to what I had to say about it, he would have to compare it, typically, to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, thereby turning it into something else, a model for alternative ways of thinking and understanding, horizontal and branching, centreless, non-linear.
“But, Papa,” I said then, “mycorrhiza isn’t an example of anything! It’s a thing in its own right! It’s there in the soil, you can dig it up and look at it with your own eyes, feel it in your hands. It’s not a concept!”
“Now, now,” he said, back to his most patronising. “I understand, I understand. But when you write about it, it becomes a concept whatever you say, whether you like it or not. You can’t just present these roots at your exam, now, can you? It’s your understanding of them the examiners are after, and that’s something other than the thing itself. That’s the whole problem with the natural sciences. Language about the world isn’t the world. Even mathematics—no, mathematics especially—is culture, it belongs to our human sphere. What the natural sciences are really about is our relationship to the world, not the world itself. And that relationship exists in language.”
“So evolution isn’t something that actually happens, it’s just something that’s inside our heads?”
“The theory of evolution describes our understanding of what we observe, yes. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve nothing against your subject, if that’s what you think.”
“What about DNA?”
“Inside our heads, as you so succinctly put it.”
“But, Papa,” I said again, “we know exactly what DNA is composed of, as well as how it works. It’s not a theory, it’s validated every single day in laboratories all over the world and in the most tangible of ways, in animals and insects, plants and bacteria, and everything else that’s living. I really don’t understand how you can deny it.”
“It’s not that hard to understand, is it? A lot of things in nature repeat themselves, so if you observe and describe a phenomenon in a certain way and understand it that way, you’re bound to understand it in exactly the same way the next time it occurs, even if it’s in a different place, in a different context.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity
4.
In his latest email to me, Dawson referenced pages 534–535 in The Wolves of Eternity. When I pulled them up on my Kindle app to reread them, I found the passage above already covered in one big block of yellow highlight.
Dawson went on to explain that this passage relates to something he’s been thinking a lot about, something he’d begun to explore last year in his (excellent) essay “Words, Concepts, Being.” The position he’s been developing, as he put it to me, “is that the ontological status of all concepts is that they are merely ‘in our heads.’” He continued:
The way in which I have been thinking about this lately is the consequences of this position with respect to two concepts which are very important to people—God and the self. My definition of "the self" is your concept of yourself, and if it is true that all concepts are logically incoherent figmentations, then it only makes sense to loosen your grip on your concept of yourself. Then there's God, the ever-changing concept. It's even a cliche for one to say that they do not believe in a man with a white beard. So what do they believe in? God is love, a higher power, etcetera. The point is that God, whether or not he exists (whatever, exactly, that would mean), is a concept. A human concept. Which means he does not exist, in the same way that you do not exist. Now, this isn't meant to be an argument against the existence of God. This is meant to be an illustration of the limits of human cognition, and the futility of any attempt to definitively characterize God, whether or not he exists, and thereby illustrate the futility of arguing whether or not he exists. But more importantly: I think it illustrates how the best understanding of God, should you choose to believe in something like that, is as something that is impossible to understand. A mystery, in the proper sense of the term. Contemplation of mystery is, I think, the truest path to spirituality. If you accept this, then I think there is an argument to be made against religion. Religion benefits from concepts in order to facilitate organization. Without an agreed-upon concept of God and Jesus etc, how could Christianity have emerged? Then this means that religion and spirituality actually exist in conflict with each other. I think it is interesting to think of religion not as something that was begotten by God or whatever, but as something that emerged inevitably as a result of very human proclivities and shortcomings.
I'm in complete agreement. Self, God, and really nothing short of the whole of the universe and reality itself, in my opinion, are plainly concepts in our heads. How could they not be? It's as inescapable as death. Despite the best efforts of cosmists, transhumanists, and immortalists—fascinating, long-running efforts that I find to be mildly thrilling and incredibly sad—death, for now, is inevitable. As I see it, death is the distant field we begin moving toward as soon as we enter life. Life, on the other hand, is the space we travel through to reach it. This traveling is what we call living. And with it comes aging. And this, too, is inevitable. Tom Petty (RIP) blessed us with many things on his travels from birth to death. But one of them was this indisputable rejoinder to people’s weird fears of aging: “If you're not getting older, you're dead." I think we can say something similar about humans and the concepts in our heads. Something like: “If you’re not dead, you’re still conceptualizing.” That's not to say that there's no truth to the existence of anything (although there might not be). It's just that we're only capable of understanding any of those things as a concepts, and we are very, very limited in our capacity to do even that.
“Contemplation of mystery is, I think, the truest path to spirituality,” Dawson wrote. “If you accept this, then I think there is an argument to be made against religion.” Accepted and agreed.2 Moreover, the former point reflects precisely what turns me off about so much in our modern, material world. We work so hard to seal off all roads to mystery, because mystery is uncertainty and we seem almost designed to react and protect against it. We work so hard to defend what we think we already know so we can go on thinking we already know it. We work so hard to avoid ever having to reconsider anything. We are like endearing but obtuse fiends clamoring to classify and prove (or refute) everything, to decide all things once and for all, to live in ways and environments that work to the detriment of our spirituality. You can see it virtually everywhere and in everything. It is in politics. It is in the news. It is in social media. It is in what Sam Kriss has called “the economic system that govern[s] the entire planet.” It is in every immovable opinion on [choose your own deeply complex social issue]. It is in the milk. It is in the meat. It is in the almond milk and lab-grown meat. It is in every inconsistent position on every mangled idea, and in every unexamined ideology and worldview. And yes, it is definitely also in religion, and organized religion is perhaps the most egregious offender, not least because it purports to be spiritual in nature.
And yet—and yet—for all its flaws, I do wonder what the consequences of a large-scale exodus (no pun intended, except for maybe a little bit) from religion would be. We seem to be in the (early? middle?) stages of one now, at least in the West, although it's impossibly hard to tell where we actually are at the moment, never mind where it will one day lead. Another writer friend told me recently that she thinks about Jesus as someone who achieved a high level of "spiritual connection and consciousness,"—meaning, I think, she looks to him as a spiritual inspiration and subject of contemplation totally separate from whatever her concept of God or religion (or even spirituality, for that matter) is or isn't. This would probably also be a fair description of many people's "relationship" with the Buddha, whether they are Buddhist or not. (Buddhism actually makes this far easier than Christianity does, in my opinion, as I think Buddhism is simply far more accessible as a standalone philosophy than Christianity is.) Still, we could just move on from religion without burning all the books and stories. But then again, I don't know, could we? People aren't going to stop looking for things to believe in and join and worship and whatnot, knowingly or unknowingly. So as long as the books and stories and humans remain, I think they will find their way to each other, even if it happens to a lesser degree than it once did. For me, the question then becomes, what will the alternatives be? Will less religion bring more contemplation of mystery? Or will it just bring more dead-eyed, AI-enhanced selfies and vlogs and TikToks, or whatever cutely named form their "content creation" successors take? Do we really need more shallow and purposeless people worshiping at the altar of the self? Do we really think we won't get them? Because, I mean, you know, look around. Anyway, please don't take these considerations to be a defense of organized religion or a dismissal of the devastation it has wrought. They're not either. At the end of the day, I'm still an atheist. It’s just that I refuse to be a devout one. My wonderings are unbounded and sincere.
5.
Einstein was so troubled by the implications of Bohr’s theories [which helped Louis de Broglie demonstrate that electrons circling a nucleus behave like waves as well as little planets] that he tried to refute them but wound up having to violate his own theory of relativity to do so. Schrödinger resorted to quoting the Vedic Upanishads, which maintain that there is an ultimate universal reality, called Brahman, and an inner consciousness, called Atman, and that they are the same thing. Sir Arthur Eddington—who helped prove Einstein’s general theory of relativity during the solar eclipse of 1919—simply observed, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
But what is true at the subatomic level can also be true for the entire universe. Physicists eventually proposed that the universe existed as a nearly infinite wave function containing all possible outcomes until conscious thought forced it to spring into existence in its current singular form. Oddly, the idea had a distant religious origin from the early 1600s, when a lapsed Polish Jesuit named Casimir Liszinski wrote a secret treatise proposing that it was humans who created God rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, Liszinki had lent a large sum of money to a neighbor named John Brzoska, and Brzoska came up with a plan to avoid paying back the debt. He stole Lisinski’s manuscript and turned it over to church authorities, who quickly stood Liszinski before a tribunal and condemned him to death. His treatise was destroyed but, ironically, its main points were preserved when they were read into the court records. They include the following (slightly edited for brevity):
“We beseech you … do you not extinguish the light of Reason, do you not oust the sun from this world, do you not pull down your God from the sky, when attributing to him the impossible. Man is the creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of Man. God is not existent. Piety was introduced by the impious. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people would be afraid of them in the end. Simple folk are cheated by the more cunning with the fabrication of God for their own oppression.”
In religious terms, Liszinski’s crime was heresy—the contradicting of God’s word. Heresy comes from the classical Greek word haireomai, “to choose,” and has long been one of humanity’s most savagely punished crimes. As the bishop of Kyiv noted with satisfaction, Liszinski was to have his tongue torn out with red-hot tongs for having offended God, his hands roasted slowly at a fire for having written against God, his manuscript burned before his eyes for having offended God, and then he was to be burned alive and his ashes shot out of a cannon. The punishment was cruel even by church standards of the day, and a royal commutation reduced it to mere “beheading and burning.”
Liszinski’s plea was that not only do you deprive God of dignity by insisting He be something He can’t—self-creating—but you also strip society of the benefits of reason. There is a point at which reason fails, however. The entire universe can be understood mathematically to the subatomic level, but only religion claims to know how it came to exist in the first place. Math and reason fail utterly in this regard. Without God, either existence is inevitable—a state for which there are no mathematics—or it is almost infinitely unlikely but came into existence during an infinity of time.
—Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying
6.
The interview excerpt below, shared in isolation like this, will probably smack of Buddhism 101. But I’m going to leave it there anyway as I think it’s relevant to what follows it, and because not everyone who reads this will have completed Buddhism 101.
Stone Age Herbalist: What are the Four Noble Truths?
Lin Kai: The Four Noble Truths are the four axioms which the historical Buddha proclaimed after he became enlightened and are the foundation for all Buddhist teaching. They are
Dukkha: To exist is to suffer
Samudaya: The cause of suffering is attachment
Nirodha: By removing attachments there can be a permanent cessation of suffering
Marga: There is a path to the cessation of suffering
—From “Interview: Buddhism, Tibet & Vajrayana with Lin Kai”
7.
The meditation course I attended was explicitly secular, and the instructor, S.N. Goenka, who is dead but whose teachings were presented to us via audio recordings, criticized organized religion numerous times in his evening discourses, which were addressed to an earlier group of meditators (in what I've estimated to be the 1990s, based largely on a single reference to a VCR) and shown to us over video. However, I found some of Goenka's thoughts and teachings about vipassana to be somewhat dogmatic and anecdotal and speculative as well, even as he presented them as supported by science.3 I won't go too deep into all of that, but the interesting part of it for me is that this secular gathering actually turned me freshly off to religion. In some ways, at some moments, I felt like a kid at church again, with a kind of rejective psychic organ in me with a hypersensitivity to anything resembling bullshit or calls for conformity. There were also aspects of the retreat that felt kind of cult-like to me. The thrice-spoken replies of sādhu (an “amen” of sorts, as I understand it) by meditators following Goenka’s many closing chants, for example. The video discourses as a whole had the same effect on me (although they also gave me a greater appreciation for all the talks that are available and far more palatable and substantive to me on the Waking Up app).
All of that said, I was able to set those more distasteful aspects aside and focus on the vipassana practice itself, which I found to be valuable in the short term and I now look forward to exploring further in the long term. The retreat overall was a rewarding and intense experience in physical pain, mental endurance, and glorious silence,4 and I’m grateful to have done it. It helped me to see, among other things, the great depths of my self-doubt and misery and so on, and to open a window in the often suffocating room of the self, insofar as such a thing exists.
Meditating 10 hours a day for 10 days straight made it very clear to me that my meditation practice prior to that had been child's play. I have no real problem with the many 10-minute pop-culture meditations in the world. They have their benefits, but they should be called something else.
Beyond what I’ve already mentioned, the main thing I think I've taken from the course thus far (it is my opinion that it will take months—another writer friend with experience in the matter tells me years—to really get a handle on the lasting benefits) is this: Everything taught, discussed, practiced, experienced, etcetera about impermanence, attachments, cravings, aversions, misery, suffering, the multiplication of suffering, sankharas,5 acceptance, equanimity, and so on was very much in line with the concepts (there's that word again) that I've been exploring and working on already for years, if not for the whole of my life. But—that prior exploration and work was basically all intellectual in nature, done only at a conscious level, at least as far as I'm aware (ha). What vipassana asserts to add is a way to do the same kind of work at an unconscious level. This is where ideas like permanently “eradicate your suffering” gain some currency. I don't anticipate, or even necessarily desire, a literal permanent cessation of my suffering anytime soon; some of that suffering is meaningful and to be revered. But I do feel as though I caught a glimpse into something powerful and (I apologize in advance) healing that I think could, indeed, serve to excise my more meaningless and disposable suffering. I hesitate to try to describe the experience in greater detail, as I'm not sure I can or even want to, but as a matter of experience, there does seem to me to be, if I may, a there there—with vipassana specifically and intensive meditation more generally.
Without question, a big part of what made the experience so powerful was just the sheer intensity of the course, as well as the simplicity of wordlessly doing one thing and one thing only across 10 days, and I do wonder to what extent the benefits of that uniquely isolated experience can truly be carried over to the real world, so to speak. I can't now recall where I came across it, but I heard someone a while back, paraphrasing someone else, talking about how it's sometimes necessary to bring a tyrant into your spiritual life to test the strength of whatever "advances" you think you've made; and well, the real world is the ultimate tyrant, and once back in it, it doesn't take long to realize that your advances have the integrity of fragile wet bubbles floating through a battlefield. So far, about a month on, I feel like I'm mostly back to my old ways—but now with meditation cushions. This feeling of regression too, though, is impermanent, and I now know—and know from experience—that an hour of sitting silently with my body and breath is enough to right the ship. It can be, at least. For a time. But only for a time. And only if I stack up enough hours across enough days to stay in good enough spiritual shape to allow for it. So there's hope in that, I guess, even when there doesn’t appear to be much of it in anything else, reality itself not excluded.
8.
The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives. But what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true. Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television. So, abandoning likelihood for a moment, one might try out the idea that death is simply where the veil of belief gets rent to reveal a greater system beyond. “Reality” may just be a boundary we can’t see past. The dead might be all around, flitting back and forth as the dying take their leave. Imagine their frantic efforts around floods and earthquakes. Around epidemics. Around Dachau.
It’s not remotely likely, but then neither is anything. If the force of gravity were even slightly weaker, stars wouldn’t be dense enough to cross the Coulomb barrier and start thermonuclear fusion. It would be a completely dark universe. If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn too hot and fast, and there would be no life. If the attractive force between electrons and atomic nuclei were too weak, electrons couldn’t orbit; if it were too strong, atoms couldn’t bond with each other. Either way, there would be no molecules. There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be ten to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are.
Given that existence itself is almost infinitely unlikely, what if there were some kind of post-death existence? What if the dead were not entirely gone, in the sense that we understand that word, and the living were not entirely bound by time and space? What if the great mysteries of the world—the spirits and ghosts and coincidences and telepathy and predictive dreams and everything else that humans have always noticed but couldn’t quite make sense of—actually had a rational explanation?
—Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying
9.
Just before I went to the course I watched this 15-minute documentary with some endurance runners I've taken a liking to. In it, one of them says, "I get validation from feeling pain. It's beautiful. It's tragic. It's hard. Above all, it's such a strong feeling. I like feeling or being in something deeply." It's not the most profound of sentiments. But it struck me just the same. So I wrote it down on a piece of paper that I brought with me (with a few phone numbers on it, since I didn't bring a phone and in case I lost my mind). I didn't look at the quote much. But I thought about it a lot, as I was in a lot of pain, especially early on. But as the days passed and I focused on the technique and got better at leaving things be, not craving the pleasant sensations/thoughts/etcetera, not feeling aversion to the unpleasant ones, recognizing the impermanence of it all, experiencing the impermanence of it all—not just conceptualizing it—this did seem to open up a less miserable, less selfish, and more peaceful and equanimous channel—a tear in the firmament of the self—that I think is worth traveling further through, like a bubble through a battlefield or not.
10.
I said, "Ms. Gallows,
I must take my leave."
I cut through the graveyard
Though the hour was lateI struck a match
Upon a tombstone
And read in horror
My name and date
—Ian Felice/The Felice Brothers, “Candy Gallows”
Thank you to Dawson Eliasen for his many months of thoughtful inspiration, encouragement, and (online) friendship; all of which powered this essay and gave me countless reasons to think and think again. Thank you to him as well for allowing me to quote his off-the-record remarks. Read Orbis Tertius or die!
Around the start of this year, I found myself looking for interviews with David Foster Wallace in which he spoke about his attempts and failures to join the Catholic Church. A particular comment of his that I came across stood out to me then and does again now: “I've gone through [the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults] a couple of times, but I always flunk the period of inquiry. They don't really want inquiries. They really just want you to learn responses.”
My point is not that no aspect of vipassana is supported by science, or even that any aspect of it needs to be—this is a spiritual practice after all. My point is only that telling unscientific stories while saying “science” here and there doesn’t “improve upon the silence.”
From the meditation center’s Code of Discipline:
All students must observe Noble Silence from the beginning of the course until the morning of the last full day. Noble Silence means silence of body, speech, and mind. Any form of communication with fellow student, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes, etc., is prohibited.
Sankharas in vipassana, as I understand them, are basically emotional knots stored in the body. I found a few of the interpretations here to be helpful and in alignment with my experience and understanding.