– What do you believe in?
– What I’m gonna tell you is by no means true nor necessary. I believe in the energy of a good story. It all started with this fucking book. I start reading it, right? And I become infatuated with it, it’s like I am feeding on it and it is feeding on me. Then everything becomes the present moment with each moment, almost like breathing. Every word cancels the previous, and it’s like tension and release, like a rhythm, like a mind game. It makes me feel rich, whole, I feel vulnerable, weak, like nothing and everything at the same time, even thou I don’t really exist anymore. Not without it, not with it. It feels like climbing a mountain. Half way through it I’m ecstatic, I feel like I know everything and I don’t even remember what I’ve read, what I’m reading. I stay there for a few pages that are way out of time, way out of any reality I’ve ever known. And then I start to descend. At this point I experience the most effortless ride you can imagine, ripping through the pages, through each letter, almost like I’m the one being read, like I’m writing it. As I approach the end I reach a kind of terminal velocity, words start to look more like dirt and rocks, that break as I am being added a new layer of matter with each rock that my new self is breaking. I feel hard and heavy and strong and responsible and unstoppable, whole, full of the story’s content all the way to the word before the last word. And as I read the very last word, I forget everything, and I wake up anew, but as if nothing happened in the time I started reading the title of the book and the now of my staring, gazing eyes at the closed book my hands are holding. I feel confused, and complete, a sense of calm satisfaction. I don’t really remember reading it, or what it is about. I feel like I just woke up from a dream. So I read it again. And again. I’ve read the damn thing so many times I’ve lost count, and it’s the same each time. Sometimes I want to read a few pages and not finish it, but I can’t. I always finish it with the same feeling. Sometimes I read it in a few hours, sometimes it takes me a few days. Sometimes, when it takes me a few days, I am in the interval of the book, so I am this different person that…knows…and I find myself in bars or coffee places, talking with people, talking on whole different levels than quotidian bullshit, but after I finish the book again, I don’t remember what I’ve discussed, with whom, and I never see those people again.
– What happened with the book? Are you reading it right now? Are you in the interval of the book or between finishing it and starting it again?
– I’m not sure you’re asking the right questions. Let’s suppose everything is the same, and existence is a mystery to itself. But you see, even this thing that it tells itself is null, unnecessary and shouldn’t exist, even if, and precisely cause it expresses the fact that expression is unnecessary. Recognition. Now that’s something. The sense, and the drive to name the unnamed. Mamihlapinatapai. The paradox of the name not naming itself holds the perception of time in a linear sense. Inbetween rests the rest. Will. To want, or the feeling of want. And you usually want to hold things still so that you experience everything through any given point of building. But you see? There lays the trick. In wanting to transcend there can be no transformation. After all, you’re standing still. Transformation requires dynamic, requires death and birth and death and birth. So then comes the question. Can you trick the universe to transcend immortality into immortality? Non linear perception of the time. Paradoxes. Let’s suppose there’s a begining and an end. At the begining we have two characters, male energy and female energy. There’s also a tree with life and truth. Sugar, spice and everything nice. They both know and they both know they know. They both feel there’s nothing to be known. Then we have the history of the universe. During which this unnamed struggles with wanting to name itself, swimming like a dolphin in and out of the ocean it creates along the way, deep down and cosmos high. To know is the worst thing you can do. But you shouldn’t know that. To know is personal. To not know is not personal, and not impersonal, but supra personal. Is not he or she, has no sex. Is not the creator of the world, but the actor of the world, the player of all parts, so that everyone is a mask. And like an absorbed actor, the divine spirit gets so absorbed in playing the role as to become it, and to be bewitched. And this is all part of the game, believing that “I am that role”. But, you see, you were fooled. You are always living for somewhere where you aren’t. There is no use planning for a future which when you get to it and it becomes the present you won’t be there. You’ll be living in some other future which hasn’t yet arrived. And so, in this way one is unable actually to inherit and enjoy the fruits of one’s actions. You can’t live at all unless you live fully now. Shinny shinny present. And so, now you know. You might not realize it, but by the time you do, you’ll notice the Sun getting further away, you falling, wondering if the wings you used to have were real at all. Did chaos win? But before you know it, in the ordinary way, when we are talking about this, graphically, and vividly, in imagistic terms, we can talk about the everlasting game of hide and seek, which the self plays with itself. It forgets who it is and then creeps up behind itself and says “BOO!” And that’s a great thrill. It pretends that things are getting serious, just as a great actor on the stage. Although, the audience know that what they’re seeing is only a play, the skill of the actor is to take the audience in and have them all sitting in anxiety, on the edges of their seats, or to be weeping or laughing, or utterly involved in what they know is only a play. So you would imagine if it were a great actor, with absolute superb technique, he would take himself in, and he would feel that the play was real. We are all acting our own parts, playing the human game so beautifully, that he is enchanted. You see what enchanted means? Under the influence of a chant. Hypnotized. Spellbound. Fascinated. The game that is being played here is playing order against chaos. But you’ve gotta have some chaos in order to play the game of order against it. But if order wins there’s no further game. If chaos wins there’s no further game. If they’re equally balanced is a stalemate. So what happens is this: chaos is always losing but never defeated. It’s the good loser. So, you see, if you get to know, order defeats chaos. You’re not a very good winner, are you? In the end, the truth is unknown to those who know it, and known to those who know it not. We still have the same two characters in our story, only they are spread in the vast unnamed, playing all scenarios, the whole infinite of them. But it was necessary for the actor to become the villain so that the I becomes the hero. A sacrifice was due. The actor wants to kill the hero and the villain. He can only kill both at the same time if he can ever win. The story begins killing the villain, leaving the scene with the message of his capability to have found a way to kill the hero alone. “Why do they think it’s so serious? They think they have so much invested” he thinks to himself. I remember the character who thinks there’s a puzzle to the universe, sees riddles everywhere and tries to solve them. Always almost succeeding for real, but the gods trick him in the very end. The game and its stakes always elevating after each end of the game. He wants so bad to be real. He marries mistaken identification. The actor gets mad. He wants to be real to play the game the way it should be played. Tired of watching. Been a witness far enough. Kills the villain to get a role in the play. But he is slave to the role. He thought he could help the hero to see there is no good and bad, but the rules either don’t budge or there’s imbalance. There is no audience. The actor, when the masks get put on and the play starts, becomes the audience. You see. There’s only thusness.. The point is to trick the audience the story this time is real for real. Before we get to the end, let’s look at another story. The attempt to trick the universe. In one of the male’s energy manifestations it figures it out. But as he has the revelation, being on the “know and want” field, he also “knows” that he can’t use it, as naming the unnamed would end existence. The revelations continue and, paying in huge amounts of energy, he figures out a way to stop time, to hold it all, from start till end, to walk on the nonpath of nonlinear time. Earlier, before, he had recognized her. They saw and were seeing each other in the middle of now here. So, in its ignorance, ambition, and want of control, he decided like a child to try out this paradox on… well, by now you’ve figured it out, it was on itself, him and her being it and all. So he returned to Utopia, and hid something from her. Just one thing, the one thing, the rest was all to feel. He then told her with the energy of a child what he had done, but you could see the mad scientist face as well. Telling her was part of the plan. He had just ask her out on a date at the end of time, even thou, not only would they meet there anyway, but they are already there. Now, all he needed was a hidden thing, the one thing, by her. Well, the story goes she never did, because maybe she didn’t even understand, or that she understood clearly. The dynamic of death and birth, in the ocean and out to the stars was doing its thing. The history of the universe continued as it always does. Their manifesting paths grew separate, and the undefined space between them was absorbing the life out of him, through his controlling definition of the undefined. He was indeed living the nonlinear time field, but he was killing and dying in the process, instead of his plan of life eternal, which he already had through being it. He was going crazy in the act of projecting his story onto the history of the universe. He was spared of the burden when he went back to her and showed what he had hid from her. Let’s suppose everything is the same, and existence is a mystery to itself. And when all scenarios are over, meaning all the time, they meet on the Planet with the garden of the one and only tree, seeing each other as the one remaining truth that needs no naming.
– So what are you fighting for?
– Life. Death is the enemy. The first enemy and the last.
– But we all die.
– The enemy always wins. And we still need to fight him. That’s all I know. You and I won’t find much joy while we’re here, but we can keep others alive.
A collage of words that came through me, Alan Watts’s words and the final lines are from Game of Thrones.
maroooned 