Reclusland

While thinking about the recent use of the “extreme” today, I had a breakthrough in the use of language.

Granted, this is nothing new, but I think I understand it in a new light today.

The word extreme, in this sense, was used by skateboarders, snowboarders, and other people engaged in sports where risk is a high factor, and a large part of the fun.

The word was used to describe the rush or adrenaline and high concentration that comes when you realize that, oh shit, I just almost died (or got almost really hurt).  This rush, once discovered and understood enough to reliably know how to achieve it, can be the source of great learning about the self.  At the very least, it can cause a pretty high self confidence and calmness when faced with other tense episodes in life.

This self-understanding/mastery is what people look up to extreme athletes for.  It is where their charisma comes from.

However, some people are not aware that the self-mastery is the important thing.  Some people, even the athletes themselves, might confuse the cause with the effect, and begin to idolize the danger and risk that leads to self-understanding, believing the risk to be the self-understanding, instead of the state of mind necessary to begin to learn the self-understanding.  (This is not to say that people do not understand this, just that they, for whatever reason, are not consciously aware of this, so they consciously explain it to themselves this way, even though they are feeling the self-mastery at work).

As this interest becomes widespread, people look to make money off of it.  They use the word “extreme” in relationship to soda and deodorant.  They are trying to attach that element of risk and danger to their products, not realizing that it is what is achieve through that danger that is ideal, not the danger itself.  But then again, you can’t use the self-understanding to sell a product, because it’s not an easy thing to fake.

If you claim that your product helps lead to self-understanding, the people who are consciously aware of the importance of self-understanding will see right through you.  And the people who are not consciously aware of the importance of self-understanding would not think that this made your product any better.

What happens then, is that the people who mistook the “extreme” risk for self-understanding claim that “extreme” sports have sold out.  And in a sense they are correct, as the danger and risk is now being used to sell a product, rather than as a path to self-understanding.  This applies to both the fans and the athletes who were only into to the sport for the risk and danger, the outer form of it.

Those who were into the sport for the inner form, for the chance at self-understanding that the danger and risk created, know that what “extreme” meant to them is something that cannot be taken away and cannot be used to sell something.  The word “extreme” was merely a quick codeword for self-understanding for them, so when it begins to mean something else to other people, it does not effect them.  As long as they were grounded in self-understanding first, and extreme sports as only a way to that self understanding, then they are not bothered by this mis-use of the word “extreme” at all, except in the way it cheapens and waters-down the “extreme” community with people who cannot even appreciate the self-understanding on even a subconscious level.

“Do not confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself.  Otherwise, you will become saddened when the finger later points to a flickering lightbulb.  What happened to all that heavenly glory?”

Thanatos is not death.  It is the mind’s attempt to make everything into a timeless, 3-Dimensional image.  A snapshot or a statue.  This is how the mind understands things, it separates them from the flow of reality.

The “death drive” that guides the mind, and which is, as some say, destroying western civilization, is not exactly a desire for death.  It is our mind’s attempt to stop things from moving, from changing, so that it can get grip on them.  Stillness does not equal death, changelessness does not equal death.  It equals control.

This is what Buddha means when he says that we have no self.  We have no fixed identity, no ‘snapshot’.  We, and everything else, is a constantly moving, changing thing.  It is not solid.  That is what is the middle ground of reality: flux, change.  The world of forms is just our abstraction, our attempt to “grasp” this dynamic changing-all-the-time-ness (which maybe can also be seen as the Dao).

As long as we only live in our minds, we are separated from the flux of reality.  Our mind is like a cave, we only see shadows on it’s walls.  But we can leave that cave if we want, although losing it is not a virtue either.  It is our house, our snail’s shell; always with us, always available to use when we need to.  But not the heart of our existence, as we believe it to be.

What I am concerned with is if there is another layer even below this fluxing change…

The ground of all being, a formless, shapeless, unmanifested energy field.

Is the ground change, flux?  Does unmanifested = Dao, does it equal life?  Or is the energy, movement, 4-dimensional reality (time as a part of space, our consciousness be aware of surrounding space/time instead of space within time…) itself considered to be manifest?  Is there truly 3 things we can be aware of (forms, formless, and complete unmanifestedness)?

I think there must be, but what it could be.

The unknown, God, the other, is our need to make a space in our conciousness for new, incoming info.  Being aware of the space.

Maybe…