The Haunting Presence of an Infinite Self

Notes on reality, awakening, and the creative life

Dear Living Dark reader,

“For a certain kind of writer—the writer subject to a vastly polar creative cycle of speaking and silence, with very long bouts of the latter—the dread of committing oneself is at least equal to the desire to be published or heard. I speak from experience.”

Those words are by me, from something I posted on social media a couple of years ago. Sometime in 2022, I realized that for several months I had been using Twitter in the same way that I have traditionally used my private journal. Maybe this came clear in association with the publication of thirty years of my journal entries. Whatever the case or cause, I looked back over my tweets since 2019 and saw that, along with quotations from books, links to articles, announcements about my own publications, retweets from other people, and the like, I had produced a slow and intermittent stream of brief reflections, meditations, and Hugh Pratherian “notes to myself” over time. Except instead of writing them privately, to myself alone, I had written them in public. And instead of being notes to myself, they were really notes to no one, not only because they felt half-directed at myself and half-directed at a semi-generic public “audience,” but because, as stated directly in some of them, one of the realizations coming clear through the very medium of the notes concerned the virtual or fictional nature of both my own personal/egoic identity and that of “others.”

As with my journal proper, this all took the form of momentary expressions of thoughts, realizations, moods, and insights that arose within me and shaped themselves into words. The topics included writing, creativity, philosophy, spirituality/nonduality, music, books, weird horror, movies—all the things that also form the substance of this newsletter. Sometimes, especially beginning in late 2021 and continuing into 2022, the notes were articulations of things that came up during morning meditation. Sometimes they conformed themselves to a single tweet, following Twitter’s length limit. Sometimes this very restriction helped me to articulate them more clearly and pointedly. Other times they spooled out to create extended threads.

I also noticed that their frequency had increased over time, with the latter entries showing their overall tenor and content to be tilting ever more decisively in the direction of spiritual advice, not so much as a matter of self-advice about what to do or how to do it, but as a matter of pointers, like the Taoist finger pointing at the moon. In other words, short statements to help maintain clarity of vision, directness of seeing/knowing, and depth of centering in the only self-evident truth there is or ever could be.

I ended up extracting all of these tweets and saving them for myself. Then the thought occurred that I might present them here to you, in the spirit of continuing to make this publication an all-encompassing stream of anything that’s happening on this side of the keyboard and feels like being shared. In early 2023 I published three posts here under the series title “Notes to No One,” containing much of this material. I also had plans for a fourth entry that never came together.

Today I’m finishing that series by deleting those three previous posts, combining them into this new one, and adding the final fourth section.

In the interest of making these contents more invitingly readable, I have kept the four-part structure and given each part its own title. The first part represents entries from 2019 through 2021. The other three represent 2022. In some cases I have added paragraphing by combining threads into paragraphs for ease of reading.

You’ll notice that some of this material is written in the second person, addressing a generic “you.” Bear in mind that this means it’s speaking as much to me as to you or any putative “other.”

(Also bear in mind that last spring I decided to leave Twitter/X behind. For me, it had served its purpose.)

Warm regards,

PART ONE: The World Is a Fiction and So Are You

If you’re a writer or other creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold neither gains nor suffers through comparison.

In the interest of being the change I want to see, I hereby adopt an attitude of radical skepticism toward all my own beliefs. I doubt all my beliefs and believe only in my doubts. We’re presently glutted with dogmatists on all sides. I long for a renaissance of uncertainty.

There is no uniform philosophical or spiritual progression in history, no general ascent toward some collective perfect way of aligning to reality. Each age and culture has worked out the problem of life in its own idiosyncratic and complete way.

Strictly speaking, there is no way of drawing directly on past wisdom to solve life’s challenge. Any attempt to do so ends up lifting a past solution out of its native context and (in)fusing it with foundationally alien worldview-level assumptions.

In light of this, I can’t help wondering what kind of philosophical/spiritual solution the present culture of digital technopoly and surveillance capitalism will ultimately arrive at, and what people of a later, different culture and era will make of it.

A couple of days ago, I perused an online book sale labeled simply “history.” Literally every title on the list was about a war. Methinks this says something not just about bookseller categories but about the Joycean nightmare that we all collectively inhabit and propagate.

That thing where you reread a book or rewatch a movie or relisten to a song from long ago, and it conjures a vivid and strangely melancholy memory of who you used to be, what you used to think, how you used to feel, and what you used to expect and anticipate from life.

Something struck me this morning: I can’t play the piano. I’ve been a musician for 41 years, but I still can’t play the piano. I can play a piano. But to play the transcendental Platonic form of “the piano” is probably permanently beyond me.

I’ve come to the realization that the books and movies I cherish most are ones that make an impact on my worldview, ones that somehow affect, enhance, and/or alter the way I see and understand the world, myself, other people, life, and the nature of reality. This explains a lot.

Thesis: Creative writers who engage with social media run the risk of squandering the intrinsic pleasure and energy that would otherwise fuel their work. The dopamine rush can be wasted. We should be addicted to our work, not to the likes of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

This also applies to compulsively checking email, page/post views, Amazon and Goodreads reviews, and the whole gamut of digital distractions and addictions that are exquisitely calibrated to hijack our focus, sap our passion, and divert us from our actual work.

Kinda feeling struck today by the implicit hamster-wheel nature of modern life.

“Why do you need a car? Why all the debt and hassle?”

“Because I have to be able to get to work!”

“What do you do for a living?”

“I make cars.”

Applicable to virtually any job or industry

There’s much strangeness and dread afoot as we collectively (and rather blindly, it seems to me) navigate through a kind of transformational gauntlet on multiple levels: social, cultural, political, psychological, economic, spiritual, ecological, and even biological.

It will be fascinating to see what this all does to art and literature. Or maybe, with the meteoric rise of the weird to an unprecedented level of cultural prominence and centrality in the early twenty-first century, we’re already seeing it.

The real question may be just how truly weird — not in the generic sense of “strange” but the specific sense of the weird in “weird horror” — reality may truly become. And would/will that weirdness be located only in our subjective experience or also “out there” in the world?

At what point will we not need to read weird fiction or watch weird cinema anymore because we can just look out the window, step out the door, watch the news, or introspect for five minutes to encounter everything we always sought from such art and entertainment?

The best way to listen to abstract/minimalist and ambient space music is with full, focused attention. What seems conventionally like background music becomes a portal to inner space and stillness. In the Gestalt of consciousness, figure recedes and ground steps forward.

Then you graduate to hearing all everyday sounds in the same way and with the same effect. Every moment becomes John Cage’s 4’33”.

Is it weird that whenever I visit a store with a stationery section — even a Dollar Tree or Dollar General — I always stop to look at the notebooks, the pens, and the pencils, and feel sheer delight at the thought of all the potential recorded thoughts and visions?

Yesterday a colleague, having read some of my essays involving esoteric and weird religious and philosophical matters, said he wondered why those who vaunt Eastern or other perspectives don't realize these may be just as time-and culture-bound as Western views. I replied:

It’s definitely wrong to refuse to place all religious or philosophical traditions on an equal footing with others by subjecting them to social scientific criticism and recognizing the conditioned and contingent factors that make them what they are.

The question becomes whether there is anything about any religion or philosophy that remains or emerges as enduring and sui generis after all temporal and cultural factors have been accounted for by a thorough (one might say a ruthless) application of methodological naturalism.

I’m of the opinion that the answer is yes, and/but that this affirmative is found in or bound up with a primal level or experience of human consciousness and subjectivity and the phenomenology of such in relation to the experience of objective consciousness.

This can sound like a lot of gobbledygook, pure moonshine, but I think it’s defensible, rational, and worth pursuing and talking about. However, talking about it as something real, and even apprehending or intuiting it as something real, is inherently difficult and elusive.

This elusive quality is due to the fact that the very minute you try to think about it, let alone talk about it or otherwise communicate it to someone else, you’re thereby operating in the contingent realm of time, language, and culture again.

In this conditioned realm, all thoughts and words can be validly analyzed and even, if desired, “explained away” as cultural products with no viable claim to stand above the fray.

But again, this doesn’t invalidate the possible existence of such an unconditioned reality. In fact, it clarifies what such a thing would actually mean and be like, and how we might approach “knowing” it.

When you’re oriented toward Zen and Vedanta and so on, and you’re also a lifelong speculative fiction fan, it can be fun to remember that the “real world” of those who scoff at fantasy, horror, and SF is just as much a fiction as any fantastic world you ever lost yourself in.

Many spiritual teachers have had troubling and even terrifying or horrifying awakening experiences. U. G. Krishnamurti called his enlightenment “the calamity.”

A fruitful meditation focus if pursued all the way to its far end: “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

In the world of TV ads for sports drinks, vehicles, medications, anything else, everybody is always snowboarding, camping, sailing, dancing, visiting a farmer’s market, frolicking with a dog in the park. Know what we need? Whole ad campaigns with nothing but people reading books.

This morning in meditation: The journalistic path to awakening.

The when is always now.

The where is always here.

The what is always this.

The who is always I.

The why is always, “Just because” — because now, here, this, I.

You know all those movies where the protag realizes he’s hallucinating a false identity? Fight Club, Angel Heart, etc. What a great metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, awakening from egoic delusion. To mangle a Zen koan: You’re actually Tyler Durden feeding a goose in a bottle.

Technically, thinking certain thoughts or choosing one set of thoughts over another has nothing to do with real religion or spirituality. But that’s what (and that’s all) many people mean when they say they’ve become religious or changed religions.

I passionately share Oswald Chambers’ attitude: “I do not read in order to notice what I disagree with, as many people seem to. The author’s conclusions are of very little moment to me, what is of moment is a living mind competently expressed, that to me is a deep joy.”

I also intensely concur with Virginia Woolf’s assertion that the core quality of a literary masterpiece — and also, I think, of an intellectual one — is not freedom from fault but “the immense persuasiveness of a mind which has completely mastered its perspective.”

I hold these attitudes spontaneously, through helpless grokking. I’m a literary omnivore who hungers for vivid expressions of living minds that can persuade me automatically via their mastery of their perspectives. This also applies to television, movies, music, and art.

PART TWO: Your Life Is a Labyrinth You Build as You Go

When you’re born, you’re placed at the center of a maze or labyrinth. Your given task and implanted desire is to find the way out. Your activity of seeking this exit is what you come to call “my life.”

But you quickly find that your very act of seeking the exit causes your life labyrinth to extend, elaborate, and complexify itself. The exit becomes ever more impossible to find in direct proportion to the extent and intensity of your searching for it.

Eventually you feel completely shut in, utterly without hope. The walls of the maze are your sensations, perceptions, thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations, desires, fears, and relationships. The maze is the inner-outer movie you call “myself.” It seems a perfect trap.

Then one day with a shock you recognize the trick, the con, the swindle: Yes, the game as given truly is unwinnable, there really is no hope — but only on the level of the game itself. Now you see what you always missed before:

There is no labyrinth, no maze. You dreamed the whole thing into existence. You never actually went searching through endless hallways with endless turns leading to infinite dead ends. You’ve always remained right where you started.

And right where you started is right where you always wanted to go. The exit is here, not elsewhere. In fact, elsewhere is an impossibility. Here is all there is. The labyrinth dissolves. You wake up and emerge into the light of the freedom you never left.

You can know that postmodernism, specifically the Lyotardian type (“incredulity toward metanarratives”), has conquered a culture when everyone talks about narratives, both other people’s and their own. In other words, when the concept of “narrative” has gone viral and become de rigueur.

The worst thing about the shattering of attention by digital distractions is that you’re never fully present. Trying to focus on a single thing feels like missing other things, so you’re never really able to experience, enjoy, or engage with anything at all. You’re a ghost.

Interesting how nondual awakening and conspiracy theorizing run parallel. Both see absolutely everything as evidence or proof of themselves. In both the very attempt to refute serves to confirm. Only the former is true, though. Reality itself as the ultimate conspiracy.

That frequent and habitual self-punking where the authentic, restful, happy practice of remaining consciously centered in the here-now is replaced by the mental-emotional simulacrum of seeking ego peace instead of the real thing. But of course the real thing encompasses this too.

“Disillusionment” carries a negative connotation, but actually it’s a good thing. Being divested of your illusions is positive. Now you can see reality better.

Social media may be the most potent tool ever invented for disillusioning us about our ourselves. Specifically, social media divest us of illusions about how reasonable, intelligent, tolerant, and compassionate we-as-egos really are. It’s like an especially mean and self-righteous version of Zen’s mad monkey mind stepping onstage and winking at us.

Of course, social media also inject their own new level and type of illusion by not only uncovering the madness but amplifying it.

The basic disillusionment is good and helpful if you take it that way. The intrinsic reillusionment is something to notice and resist via irony.

On the idea of social media as a mere tool we use, a neutral item: Like all tools and technologies, social media are not purely neutral and passive. Using them is reciprocal: They use us back. The railroad rides us.

Technologies intrinsically shape and affect their users. Communication tech especially shapes us cognitively and affectively. And social media do this with greater (and more terrifying) speed/efficiency than any tech since television, and before that, the printing press.

We don’t use technology, we relate to it, as to a sentient organism. It thus requires the same careful tending as any other such relationship.

Watching and listening to what everyone is saying and doing on every conceivable end of the political, social, economic, moral, religious, philosophical, and environmental macro-spectrum. And observing that, yes, the archetype of apocalypse has now been fully, deeply activated.

I hereby propose a transvaluation of values. No longer regard laziness and downtime as a period of recharging for work and productivity. Instead, regard work and productivity as a period of recharging your ability to relish, savor, and suck all the marrow out of laziness and downtime.

I’ve developed a three-step process for discovering the real truth about your life and the universe, and how they’re related.

Step 1: Write down everything you really know about life. Not beliefs from books etc. but your own personal knowledge, what you’ve learned for yourself. Beliefs about work. Life purpose. People. Interpersonal relationships. Families. Governments. Society. Money. History. Art. Education. Religion. Reality itself. Let your personal interests be your guide. What truths have authentically impressed themselves upon you?

Articulate these beliefs, these truths, in the form of declarative statements. Don’t equivocate. Be bold. Make a personal manifesto: “This I Believe.” Lay out your genuine, firsthand knowledge and convictions, your hard-won wisdom, what you as a unique individual know.

Step 2: Let your list cool off. Step back. Take a breath. Read over it again. Enjoy the sense of satisfaction that comes from having finally stated all this stuff, from having snatched your personal life’s wisdom from the sea of formlessness and made it clear and shareable.

Step 3: Crumple up your list and throw it away. Better yet, burn it. You don’t know anything. Everything you wrote is false. Reality isn’t ideas, statements, or insights. Reality simply is. And your most vivid personal insights only remove you from it.

PART THREE: The Haunting Presence of an Infinite Self

The oddly gratifying realization that the only ultimately consequential spiritual truth is perfectly expressed in Highlander’s nondual battle cry of the immortals: “There can be only one!”

Interesting how the mornings when I feel distinctly uninterested in meditating and most strongly inclined to skip it are also the ones where the meditation is uncommonly deep if I go ahead with it. As if the very disinclination is the ego sensing an imminent threat.

Piercing realization that Luke’s explanation in Cool Hand Luke of how he looked totally broken, fooled the prison guards into thinking he was now their submissive pawn, and then shocked them all by stealing and escaping in their truck contains the secret of life itself:

Dragline: All that time, you was plannin’ on runnin’ again!

Luke: I never planned anything in my life.

You can literally never speak the truth. You can never even think the truth. You can’t feel, sense, or see the truth. As Shakespeare’s Brutus plus a thousand Zen masters have observed, “The eye sees not itself.” You are the truth. By contrast, everything that is an object, is not.

Always remember: People aren’t stereotypes, even—and this is critical—when they appear to act like one. Also: To the extent that you view and treat people as stereotypes, you become one yourself. In the real world you only ever meet individuals. Magnificent singularities.

For a certain kind of writer—the writer subject to a vastly polar creative cycle of speaking and silence, with very long bouts of the latter—the dread of committing oneself is at least equal to the desire to be published or heard. I speak from experience.

On the truth communicated in the Buddha’s Flower Sermon: “A special transmission outside the scriptures . . . directly pointing to the mind, seeing into one’s true nature.” Fun fact: Literally everything in objective experience is the Buddha’s flower. The whole world is a Flower Sermon. “Those with ears (eyes), let them hear (see).”

In essence the teaching of any spiritual master—Jesus, the Buddha, anybody—is to help you realize just how full of shit you really are relative to your core identity with the Absolute.

This means spouses, bosses, parents, children, etc., can be your best gurus.

I keep returning over time (or, more accurately, “over time”) to the remembrance that all sense of something to be achieved or gained is actually an optical illusion, because ultimately I Am the achievement or object, in whatever form, that I (“I”) think I want.

Recommendation to writers: Maintain a focused freewriting practice. This keeps the channel open to the unconscious mind that shapes/supplies the words. It helps preclude the misfire that occurs when the right words to connect your creative impulse with actual expression won’t come.

Personally, as I see-feel-grok the situation these days, I find myself intuiting that the abyss of the divine, Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, is not dreadful and terrifying as a matter of its inherent nature, but that it cannot help appearing so from our vantage point as finite selves confronted “from behind,” so to speak, by the haunting presence of an infinite Self within our self, the Being of our being, the Absolute to our relativity, the ultimate Other that turns out to be not an infinite Thou but the infinite “I” lurking behind our ego selves and perpetually putting the lie to our hopes, dreams, schemes, and pretensions.

PART FOUR: The World Was Born into You

The trick is to deeply and directly question the nature of reality, the real nature of this experience of self-aware self and world, awake subjectivity and enclosing environment. Not a thought-question but a fundamental one—living, wordless, immediate. Then all bets are off.

Time is the medium through which eternity expresses itself to itself, for itself. Eternity is the fulfillment, the telos, of time in the ever-presentness of the present moment. Awakening is living consciously at that intersection, that stillpoint.

You think you were born into this world, and that you have an expiration date. But in fact this is an exact inversion. The world was born into you, and you will continue when it dies and disappears. Standard nondual wisdom, but piercing when it finally, actually comes clear.

Sometimes I speculate about a world where people live their whole lives relating not to reality, including other people, but to their own psychological projections. It’s also a world where technologies, traditions, and cultural institutions all endorse and abet this delusion. Then I look around, observe the “real world,” and say, “Oh.”

To think, see, and act not in search of satisfaction, peace, happiness, fulfillment of desire, but from the standpoint and knowledge of ultimate desire always already fulfilled, prior to thought and action—what, concretely, does that look like? This is the practical question.

The basic error of assuming that any event in time and space, whether in an individual’s experience or the collective human cultural-historical drama, could cause or constitute spiritual awakening. Totally backwards. Awakening is by definition from this, not of it.

The really fruitful spiritual and philosophical state is when you finally find the questions to all of life’s answers. When you wake up to the fact that your whole outlook has been a giant tangled mass of unrecognized, unexamined, preprogrammed assumptions.

The secret behind the appeal of movies like Angel Heart, Fight Club, Identity, and The Ward—movies hinging on the revelation that certain key characters, maybe even the protagonist, are projections or hallucinations—is that they represent our actual lived experience.

You and I as separate egos are dream characters, hallucinations, projections of the One Self. This isn’t a fanciful New Age/science fiction assertion that absurdly tries to read something like a Philip K. Dick novel onto mundane reality. Rather, it’s the self-evident truth.

The given facts, or rather fact, of immediate first-person experience, the evidence of the apparent subject/object divide itself, resolves into the givenness of absolute, spaceless, timeless, undivided presence-awareness, the One Self, when looked at directly.

We have this notion that gaining and then enlarging, refining, perfecting our personal identity, our thoughts, feelings, memories, talents, and experiences, is why we’re here, and that therefore losing this identity is a tragedy. But in fact losing it is the point. That’s awakening.

The sense of simultaneous gall and humor that arises when you finally recognize that your entire life, and most especially every effort you have ever made in your “spiritual search,” can accurately be described as taking the long way around.