I am nothing

 

Truly intelligent thought has a grasp of things that lies well beyond the ordinary; and it is not under the direction or control of ordinary thought.

Ordinary thought is, generally speaking, a big mess. It takes everything at the same level and can reduce the finest thought to something as stupid as a rock. This reduction leads to a kind of fixation in which thinking appears to be fluid and nimble but is in fact set like concrete. There is a structure; but the structure is slow-moving and essentially dormant, despite its appearance of activity. It sits like a dead log in the middle of life and occupies the path that living and being ought to be following. At best, one needs to stop one’s bicycle, get off, and climb over it to proceed anywhere real. Yet the log itself looks so real that it commands us in an eternal appreciation moment, where we contemplate its awesome nature and forget the fact that it is in the way of where we want to go within being.

In this sense we fall in love with the log. Theoretically, like all wood, if it is shaped and formed it ought to be useful for us; and yet what we become good at is lighting logs on fire. People are seized, almost constantly, by their sex energy and other energetic parts of being that aren’t functioning harmoniously, and the friction of this uses ordinary thought as fuel to create exciting fires that mostly cause problems for oneself and others. It’s no reach to comment that this explains our proclivity for destroying our environment without even a second thought to it. The principal function of thought which is burned in inappropriate conflagrations is to destroy.

I had occasion to comment this morning on a meditative tool intended, I think, to focus this problem more acutely. It consisted of the practice of saying, “I am nothing. I have nothing. I want nothing.”

This nothingness sounds important; and I think the thought behind it is in fact important. Nonetheless —I am on board with it, but only halfway on board.

The temptation is to illustrate this with a somewhat facetious example, but I don’t think that pays due respect to the essential nature of the question. And it could easily be misunderstood, because my perverse sense of humor is just as likely to do damage to a situation as enhance it — a fact I have learned to my own consternation on more than one occasion.

The issue I find with the statement as it is is that only half of me is actually like this. One of my natures is capable of perceiving this intelligently and organically; the other one has no clue about it and at best absorbs it philosophically, taking it at about the same level as everything else it encounters. So only the one part that is still within understands and appreciates the fact that I’m nothing.

The other half absolutely insists that I’m something. It wants things. There is no use denying this situation. For example, that part of me has spent most of the weekend wanting a specific Stratocaster. God knows I do not need more guitars. But the part that wants this guitar is a piece of steel reinforced concrete.

Where, then, exactly, does that leave us? The situation reminds me of a comment Wade Davis makes about the Kogi in his new book, “Magdalena — River of Dreams.” They believe that an individual should sin from time to time so that goodness has a context within which to operate.

Elaborating on this premise, if we don’t have the part that thinks it is something and wants things, the other part is unable to manifest in contrast — which is, in the end, I think, exactly the point of it in the first place. It would lose its purpose; and a thought without purpose is a lonely thing. 

“I am nothing. I have nothing. I want nothing” represents, taken in its entirety, an impulse towards nothingness. It is meant to be a force that leads me in the direction of understanding that. In a paradox, the force itself already becomes a thing. 

What are we to do with that? Perhaps it’s a koan; and that would make sense, because generally speaking the purpose of a koan is to present an irresolvable dilemma that forces the action of thinking and form itself past what it is into unknown territory.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.