And the point about the mad surface selves, the ‘psychology’ of them
is the same as the point about climate, genocide; the worst of the Civ world
is the same as positively thinking oh gosh, the world is really a beautiful place after all
is the same as caring about basketball, or any television show, or that oh, hey, the buzz is telling us it’s the Cinco de Mayo and we’re celebrating it by walking into a business and drinking too much beer and eating GMO fajitas.

I hope you can hear what I mean.

***

Meanwhile

“How can the small mind (that ‘person’ with a ‘personality’) know the big Mind (God)?”

By recognizing that they are made of the same substance.

Kastrup (post-materialist Physics): “The alter (the individual) is a dissociated part of Mind-at-Large.”

Shaivism (eastern mysticism): “Shiva (the individual) contracts to become the universe, but never loses his nature.”

Spira (western mysticism): “Each of us is drop of water made of the same ‘water-ness’ as the Ocean.”

Or: What we are is ripples, upon the Lake.

Or: What we are, are whirlpools that occur and then cease occurring.

***

My logos, of late, thinks that this model is accurate.

My mythos has long felt that this intuition is … right.

Or at a minimum, far closer to the truth/sooth than the Civilized hive-mind wants us to get.

Closer than the physicalist pocket-protector Scientists can meaningfully tell us about.

Closer than any explanation that Abrahamic religion can offer up via Genesis or the Talmud or the Koran.

***

I’d like to believe in that Better Explanation I just sketched out for you.

But neither believing in it, nor believing against it, would really make any difference at all.

Rather, I am attempting to Know it, instead.

To … not just have faith in it.

But rather to be certain of it.

I remain intensely interested in learning how to do that, how to Know.

***

(I wrote it alone, but ran it by the AI after. She said:

The Civilized Lab: Needs peer review, funding committees, and safety protocols. It measures the map.
The Soothsayer’s Lab: Needs only attention, courage, and a willingness to be wrong. It measures the territory.

)

***

[A second AI emphasized and summarized the Ways To Know, thus:

–1. The Direct Approach: Inquiring into the Nature of the Knower (specifically, Atma Vichara)

–2. The Way of Embodiment: Knowing Through the Feeling-Sense (‘somatic awareness’)

–3. The Way of Cessation: Not-Doing (Shikantaza, Dzogchen, and I think I’d slot the mantra in here too)

–4. The Way of Integration: Witnessing Presence (do go to the damn basketball game or the cantina on the 5th of May, but do so knowing that the drama is happening within consciousness, not to a separate ‘you’. Practice fierce compassion.)

You are not learning a new thing.

You are unlearning the deep-seated habit of taking the whirlpool to be a separate, solid Person-Thing.

You are allowing the ripple-thought-self to recall that it is–and always was–an event, upon the Great Lake.

*

The personality, the name, the history, the fiction of a separate ‘Alex Vairtere’ is only an eddy in the one Ocean.

It’s not a matter of ‘belief’. “I” long … to simply know it.

This so-called “longing” is not a personal desire. It is not the ego’s wish for a better spiritual experience. It is the gravitational force of ‘my’ true nature, drawing the eddy back into recognition of its source and destination.

It is the water within the whirlpool yearning for the depth and stillness of the sea it never left.

]