Shepherds of emptiness. Third and Final chapter: somebody loves you

Let’s recap from the previous episodes:

The train of sentient universe is going to crush horrendously in to nothing. OK? This the destination of any living being: one day it will stop to be alive.

The folding of complexity on itself till the auto-representation of its own projection becomes consciousness. OK? (Very roughly of course).

So we have a mind that is aware of its mortal destiny. You can do good, you can do bad. “Good” and “bad” always relative to a culture, a situation, a system of meanings. As a rule of thumb when you are doing bad, you are causing more distance, more separation in the universe. You are a thermo-dynamical rascal. Bad bad bad.

Doing good is respecting the proportion of the universe. I suppose that helping out a fellow bro that is not doing too well is better than slaughtering an entire elementary school. Of course. But the difference is more about the narrative that led us in that context and that will depart from it.

Because, “technically “speaking, it is not impossible to commit a massacre with pure heart. Surely I’d like to talk to such a Buddha. If he is able to gut another fellow mate without hate, revenge, even without will to impose its own significance, well he’s probably not committing any “wrong” action. I doubt such a person exists. Most of all, I doubt that any human being could be able to enact such a carnage with limpidity of soul. On the contrary I can perfectly imagine a heart unperturbed like steel, doing charitable deed for the benefit of his fellow mate, without any attempt of significance: helping him out like wind, like rain, unfazed if he dies or survive. So let’s soften his pain, dress his wounds. Wait.

Isn't it obvious that helping is better than hurting? Mmmmm. In principle, yes. But it is very difficult not to attach the will of significance, to hang meanings to a purely good deed in itself. So: who told you that is better living rather than dying? Then they are right the lizards and the bankers: try to expand the living mass, to stretch life expectancy. Which means that every time you feed your fellow, you are eating your own good deeds. But you can jeopardize to gorge your mind: with vanity of your magnanimity, of your all-knowing intellect. When you feed your mind with significance of its action, then your eating your selfishness.

Who told you that peace in the universe cannot be brought by a healthy elimination of human beings? Violence is bad…Yes of course. But so it is the sweet temptation of sanctity. Too much significance, too much love for the self. So as a rule of thumb, help out instead that kicking in the face. But leave your deed before it gets you. If you are easy in avoiding the slobbering of your good deeds, then charitable agency is good. Otherwise, well the universe attributes the same importance to your dying or surviving. So….So try not be an asshole, do your honest good deeds and that’s it.

Which takes us to the next station. When we can observe the universe in his aging course towards extinction, we can measure our own mortality. Kingdoms and gods, the most powerful demon and the most compassionate Buddha, they are all fading away in the void of nothingness. Yes: the purest heart of a Buddha will go into nothing at all. Sound strange for Christian hears, but yes, after enough eternity, the choir of Cherubins and just souls will stop. It will take a long time, but there is a point in the future (or in the past) where the angels will get so bore of their chants that their own yawing will devour themselves and they will disappear. End of Jesus. So if you get that at a certain point, even god will stop, then you can relax. And you can appreciate the universal, ontological sunset. One “day” in the future, the universe with all its gods and demons and Jesus, and Buddhas, will end. Like any human being is destined to expect.

Actually if you look dispassionately at THIS specific sunset, at the termination of your days, at your own death,  you can see the end of the universe. And if you can feel the end of the heartbeat of this ill fellow mate in front of you, you can actually feel the death of God. The train of the sentient universe is abiding in human consciousness no less than in the thousand minds of the highest god. Which is ok, I mean, not bad. The entire universe embodies in your consciousness and your feeling of fading away, of leaving this realm, is the very being of the universe feeling that homesickness of mortality. 

When you will close your eyes, your end of consciousness will be the end of everything. Of “one” everything among the infinite everything that constitute the universe. One consciousness is the fractal representation of the entire sum of every consciousness, from the almost imperceptible cognition of amoebas and bacteria, to the omniscient mind of gods. Our very limited consciousness is enough to grasp the texture of everything.

The essence of things, the being of the universe is moving from existence to impermanence through yourself. We are shepherds of being, taking care of its passage to nothing. We are now as we were at the beginning, with our ancestors in Africa. But we are shepherds in so far we are conducting the being of things towards their pastures of meaninglessness. When we take the being of the universe in our land without any significance, when we are able to attend our death as the death of every god and demon, then we are good shepherds. And we reconcile the universe of sentient beings with the inscrutable realities of mindless planets and rocks. In that instant, you are doing THE good deed and you reconcile with the universe, which is, by the way, the glory of eternal presence. Till it lasts. 

Shepherds of Emptiness Volume Two

A good action is a deed that is restoring the hidden structure of the universe: which is fundamentally meaningless. Planets, rocks, cyclones they all are mute of meanings. They are not in the game of significance. In fact the Red Giant on Jupiter doesn’t give a dime of what will happen. Alpha Centauri is absolutely cool about the future. And so on. Instead amoebas, jelly-fish, cats, gibbons and you, we are all freaking out about what is coming from the future. So we started to develop tricks. You think you are a good player just because you have a massive nervous system. Try to get laid without arms, legs, eyes, even without lungs, bowels, completely deprived also of mitochondria, chromosomes and the rest, for what it matters. You must be quite good to do it under those circumstances.

Yet viruses are in the game as well and amoebas are pretty good. You know how I know that? They are still around. And they choose to stay in that line of business. You like to play the game with big consciousness, they choose to stay small, stay fit, get laid a lot. “Established 3.9 billion ago”, not bad for a commercial premises. It gives an impression of reliability.

So our big consciousness is just trying to make a living in the same, crowded game. And we are doing OK I suppose. Our big brains required also to express the game. Yep. We started to tell the story of the game, to say explicitly what the rest of crew was simply doing. Yes my friend, “that” is your mind. Our mind is simply projecting the deployment of life. Now we can say two or three things. Well, three. The first is that THIS is not YOUR mind. Now, try to stay with me for another second. I’m not bullshitting about universal soul or the like. I’m just saying that the self-consciousness you are embodying, it not your property, is not speaking of your biography. Not only and for the most.

Gangs of protein chains, worms which made the trick of walking on their back ( thus capsizing their dorso-ventral axis: we are actually descendants of those jesters…), small rodents elusive of dinosaurs, Australopiteci clever enough to stand up after squatting all day, all that lineage is embodied in your mind. Just to let you know.

So when you are using this powerful projector, you have two ways. One is to consider it the repetition of the same.  You are just the newest born of a tribe and soon you’ll be overtake by another newer born, you’ll die as everybody before. Don’t cry. It’s happening what always happens, what could not but happen. You are the micro-figment of the large repetition. Innumerable universes flourished before you, they crushed and many others bloomed afterwards. Our small universe will disappear as the others did and on its void another will take place with different but equal creatures, with alien, distant but equal consciousness that will narrate and be aware of the repetition as you are. You will join the eternity of presence, because you have always had. Every single detail of your awareness is preserved.

The mere contingency is contingent ( If you think that is an informationless tautology, I should add that the this mere contingency is your individual selfish biography, namely everything you will call “I”. So be careful, sometimes tautologies can be really cruel). This is the glory of the mind. In the imperishable persistency of consciousness, there are no meanings, because every reference is reminding the same. OK. So? So properly speaking any difference is recomposed in the unity. There is no good, no bad, no “I”, no them. Fullness. This is the place in the sun of the universe, enlightenment, Jesus with sunglasses. Very nice, but if you REALLY understood this, well, congratulations. I’m just surprised that you are still reading my post. Oh right. You are eternal and everything, every instant is already happening as it always did, so basically you are me. Yet, I’m still not feeling as you, so I must be on the other side. Which is where the rest of humanity is. Where all the small, insignificant details of contingency are. Where the fading of existence dwells. In a word, where the shit is.

The entire sentient universe is a train going full-steam towards annihilation. Some of us, like amoebas, lizards, bankers are fucking everything that moves and eating what is not them. You can call it a strategy. It’s all right, especially if you are laying eggs. A bit more tensed if you are in the financial sector: sooner or later your mammalian brain should encounter “small” discrepancies with this behaviour. Anyway. From the encultured primates above, the journey to the end of existence is source of explicit anxiety. And a dilemma in philosophy of language: where are all the meaning hung up to? If everything is destined to nothing: what is the sense of every single meaning, apart from the practical, instrumental situations of semantically getting laid? That’s difficult and try to follow me carefully, because even I didn’t quite grasp it perfectly myself…

TO BE CONTINUED...

Shepherds of emptiness: breaking through the infinite coping with understanding Volume 1

Brain, brain, how many times I’ve talked to you? We understand, right? Maybe we give wrong (very wrong) interpretations of the fact happening to us. But we put them together in a coherent flux. This is understanding. And we have it. Amoebas, medusas, cats, octopuses, even chimps and bonobos, they are aware of a lot, but they don’t understand. But we do. OK, so what? First of all, we understand the basic: that we are born, that we are alive, that we love, that we hate. And that we’ll have to die. So far, so good. The second step is our social engagement. To do all the basic things as social actor, we need to undertake complicated journeys in our socio-cultural environments. 

Essentially we weave embodied cognitive habits in the texture of our socio-cultural niche. We erect conceptual machinery attached to our body in the form of personal identity. Or you can say that our mind is made of the narratives generate in the child-rearing process we call infancy. Good. But wait for the hot sausage. Narratives are the wild, delirium-like riding of our brains, bumping into each other to produce these self-confirming buildings of knowledge. So when you track down the meaning of a narrative (that would be understanding) you end up in a reference to another meaning, which is another reference, so it turns out that meanings are hot air balloons, self-supporting each other. We call that the “Munchausen effect”. Outside the circle is mocked as “nihilism”. Let’s stick to a kind of Munchausenian semantics. It sounds German, so it must be good, deep and good.

Apart from this deranged, decadent semantic mass-mobilization, the only hard ground of human affairs is the pulse of life, to keep on, to reproduce, to get laid. Look at BBC or Discovery’s program:  from the deepest abysses, to the arid deserts, every single living being is looking to shag a member of its species. Or another. Incidentally we have to admit one manifest truth. We are so obsessed with the unambiguous logic of sex that we easily forget one thing: life is shagging everything that moves, everything that exists. Fishes sprays of sperm the ocean, some of that genetic jam could have impregnated unexpected gonads. Unsure? Well bacteria tend “to do it” horizontally. They exchange genetic material from each other. And when plants are opening their flowers, do you think that a jet of floating Deoxyribonucleic acids and sugars in the form of semen would be rejected just because it doesn’t have the right tag? I don’t think so.

We are in nature world my friend, where there is living information around, we get it. Isn’t it from our species? We happy anyway. So next day when you give solace to yourself alone in the woodland…be thoughtful of your generative power and be a responsible giver: give in fullness.

Anyway, we were saying that from salmons to polar bears, from whales to ants, life is about sex. We are no different, but we politely prefer to consider ourselves more evolved. We have values and principles. We have minds and purposes. Our shagging is more meaningful.

Yeah, alright.

That could work at university’s parties… (Even Dennett says that the “goal” of our life is to attach our existence to big ideals. C’mon Danny, you too are trying to get laid…?).

What is always difficult is that between the “meaningful shagging” and nihilism, well it’s seems there is no alternative. And here come ethics. But between meanings and nothingness there are facts. Please don’t waste time about the issue: facts are created by our meanings. Of course: I’m a Munchausenian semanticist. But when you encounter a slap, that is absolute. A slap on your check is a slap. Tautological? Perhaps. But slaps are to be felt. That’s why they are used to often for teaching wisdom. By the way they must be administered only to disciples who will give it back as soon as they realize the awakening power of slaps. A teacher must be prepared to receive it straight away. That’s why slaps are good in Zen.

So back to facts. It’s the trail of deeds. You can call it Karma. I like also “Mascara”: same principle. Slobbers of your agency.

Now, you may be led to think that deeds, Karma, ethics, are connected to good actions. Like cosmic boy-scouting. Or Christ came, was nailed and tortured, because you committed impure deeds and he loves you. come and take the shit for you because he loves you. No. And that’s because Bruce Willis is not the Dalai Lama (though Her Holiness should stop meddling with the C.I.A…..). And also why Christians didn’t really get a single word of the reverend, poor old Nazarene boy (by the way, peace to you as well). NO.

That’s false. Cosmic things , the texture of universal being are uttermost uninterested in your petty misbehaving. Real “good actions” are not actions at all. If you leave a slobber, that is a negative action. If you boy-scout around, because it means something “good”, you are already slobbering. No matter how good it sounds, you are already in the slug club. Don’t take me wrong: are you helping another bro? That’s good, keep on doing it. Much better than smoking dope all the day. But. Yeah, but.

TO BE CONTINUED....