Reclusland

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.