Day 546: Fear Dissolves in Truth
Day 546: 3 November 2022, Thursday
Don’t try to reify your models. Every model is a kind of trap, a conceptual trap. The intuitive mind can know theories and models, it applies them everywhere, our senses and schematics, maps and organizations — but in the here and now, it’s the models that crash and burn (and die, creating a fertile ground of becoming). That’s their job, an effigy, a martyr. They’re there to show us the way, a clear path, but we’ve got to walk it. At the end of the day, we must put down our chains of righteousness. ‘What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’ The truth is, you can’t reify your models. It’s just not possible. We don’t have the power.
And that’s the whole, fun game of it. We cast our nets and if we catch something, we rejoice. If we don’t, we don’t. And so we keep catching, and catching, until we realize we’ll never be satisfied with the one, not even the two, but we need more, and more, and yet more, multiplicities upon multiplicities. Models and methods, theories and ideas. Great stuff! Most of it. Some of it. Or only this part, this one, this thought that we think to ourselves, ‘Oh, this is really good, this is so true.’ What is it? I couldn’t tell you, you choose. If you’ve already stopped reading, never got this far, you’ve already crashed and burned through my model here, well, what can I do? At that point, I’m just talking to myself, no? That’s the fun of it, too.
‘In the world, but not of the world.’
Every time you give in to fear, you contribute to the whole leviathan of fear, the very fear that fuels each one of us to lock our doors and keep to ourselves. ‘Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.’ But if you see through fear, see that what you thought was a snake is really a rope, what you imagined was a beast is really a frightened person, you create space for life to sprout new growth, a possibility for change. Fear dissolves in truth.
Just because a being doesn’t have a body, don’t assume they’re wise. I don’t have a body insofar as you know. You might assume, I might assume, but how do you know if you don’t see it? May never see it? Another theory, another attempt to reify a model of perception. Don’t assume I’m wise or even have something to say. If you’re here, reading this, it’s because you want to be, you like it. There are a lot of beings out there without bodies. Most of them are just as lost as you and me, and like you and me, they’re just doing things because they like it, too. Spooky.
Abandon the myth that we’re “somebody special.” Who am I, really? Out of all the billions upon billions of humans who have ever lived, how absurd is it to ask: “Am I special?” Of course, I am special. You’re not me. That’s pretty special. But it’s a myth of hubris. Do I really think the scribbles of thoughts on a page can convey the truth? That I am That? How serious are we when we ask that question? Nobody is exempt from being somebody. Try that on for size.
Nature is a circle.
‘Man and nature are not like two opposite terms confronting each other — not even in the sense of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather, they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product.’
Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 4-5
Take the goal as the path. Everything is curriculum. Triggers are teachers. All is grist for the mill. It is only in this moment that life is. Only now, here. Nowhere.
How might one live?
‘If had ye faith, ye could move mountains.’
