Cosmic Horror Is a Zen Koan

Lovecraft and the dream of being trapped inside a haunted cosmos

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

Dear Living Dark reader,

The paragraphs below all came out unexpectedly when I started writing this morning, based on whatever factors were at work in my writer’s mind without my being aware of them on the front end. So I’m just going to share them with you in essentially the form they arrived. Take them for entertainment value, if you like, or for whatever other value they may suggest to your own mind and sensibility on this gray, warm, humid, rainy morning (or at least that’s the weather here in North Arkansas).

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“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” So said Lovecraft in the famous opening line of “The Call of Cthulhu.” That sentence can, I think, become a helpful focus or prod for waking up from the dream of egoic identity and the trance of alienated individual existence, if we want to take it that way.

Not just that sentence but the whole paragraph of which it’s a part lays out a vision of coherent intellectual and scientific knowledge as a terrible thing, corrosive to our sense of psychological and cosmic security, because such knowledge reveals “our frightful position” in the cosmos:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Thus, our cosmic situation, as laid out in the rest of the story—along with the wider body of Lovecraft’s cosmic horror fiction—is one in which we are vulnerable, tiny, isolated creatures that have evolved into self-awareness in a vast cosmos that grinds perpetually on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, in infinite, meaningless cycles, while also being populated by a host of what are, from our perspective, monstrous and nightmarish entities whose scope, power, perspective, and presence dwarf and threaten ours. In other words, in this scheme, if we come to a true and accurate knowledge of our position, we will recognize that position as so horrible that the knowledge will either drive us insane or propel us with repulsive force back into a dark age of forgetfulness—probably only for the same cycle of ignorant bliss leading to horrified knowledge to repeat itself forever.

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The thing is, this metanarrative, like all others that claim to account for the whole, is inherently incredible—in the literal sense of unbelievable—precisely because it attempts to tell an all-encompassing story that includes and subsumes the very subject to whom the story appears. In other words, us. Or rather, more specifically, me in my inescapable subjective field of experience. And you in yours.

When we examine the story, we find that it actually reveals the contours, and maybe even the core principle, of the ego-self itself. That self is elicited within the total field of experience by the sights, sounds, shapes, and sensations that, from the beginning of what we call our life—which is really just the instantaneous appearance of a total world—begin exerting a formative influence, generating a hypnotic trance of subjective separation from an objective world.

Among those formative influences are our parents, along with all the other differentiated, moving figures that populate this immediately appearing realm. These relational influences work to form a sense of “inside” (me) that is distinct from “outside” (world). I/inside am separate from world/outside. I can affect it, and it can affect me. It can even threaten me. In fact, the outside world is ultimately a deep mystery: the old mystery of “the other” and the question of what I can ever actually know about the reality beneath its appearance, the fabled noumenon that forever eludes my direct grasp or understanding.

Followed to its conclusion, the logic of this invented scheme leads to a conception and perception, and an overall emotional sense, of absolute isolation within an ego shell. A sense of lostness in a world I (and you) never made.

This is precisely the same emotional logic we find in the Lovecraftian scheme of cosmic horror, most exquisitely distilled and compressed, in my opinion, into that opening paragraph of “The Call of Cthulhu.”

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In such a situation, the very unpleasantness of it all—which can even intensify into all-out horror for those of us who, for whatever reason, feel irresistibly drawn to probe these things deeply—can lead us to seek solutions to it or escapes from it. And the only escape in the end is the one disclosed by the famous Zen koan about the gosling placed in a large glass bottle with a narrow neck and raised to maturity inside, so that it’s now trapped. How do you get the goose out without either killing it or breaking the bottle?

The trick lies in the very nature of the situation that the Zen practitioner is asked to imaginatively generate and contemplate. The goose is ego-you. But, in the wider sense, you are also the one who put it inside the bottle and who still stands outside it, never having entered it in the first place.

The Lovecraftian cosmos of meaningless cyclical perturbations of matter and energy, populated by vast multidimensional entities that are utter horrors from the human vantage point, is a Zen bottle. The frightened, pathetic, puny human who fears what correlated knowledge may reveal in such a universe is a goose. The very sense of horror that accompanies this human-goose perspective may become the most pointed provocation to question the veracity and validity of the whole vision, even to the point of uncovering its foundations through inquiry and introspection, and thus waking up from the dream of being one who inhabits and is trapped within the vision.

How do you escape the imprisoning bottle of the ego and the haunted Lovecraftian cosmos? By coming to reality as it actually is, as it actually presents itself. In various familiar tellings of the koan, the goose-in-bottle question is posed to a Zen master by a philosopher, or maybe a military man. The master suddenly claps his hands and shouts the man’s name. Startled, the man snaps to attention and says, “Yes, master?” Whereupon the master declares, “See, the goose is out!”

But the words themselves aren’t the answer. What counts is the actual understanding—the realization and recognition—that the one who seemed trapped within the vision was always and actually the one in whom the vision was unfolding, whether that vision involved a goose in a bottle or a person in a cosmic nightmare.

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