What Nothingness Points To (An Exploration of Duality and Self)

[Keryo Koffa]

Since this post is so long, you can just read the summery in parentheses after each paragraph.

We have experiences, build correlations, identify patters, materialize desires, externalize needs and project them onto objects, destinations, lifestyles. We wire our mind, connect one sensation onto another, intertwine it with emotions, project and create experiences, entangle ourselves in reality, connect dots, try to make sense, find out what stays consistent, pursue what we correlate with meaning, react based on our understanding, preference, model of reality. We go meta, analyze from a higher vantage point, take on new axioms, untangle one experience from the other, build new context, strive to be more objective, less biased, less self-indulgent, more understanding, more aware of the big picture, a holistic view of where we are, what we are, how we are, why we are, that we are, to see our assumptions as assumptions, identify our intent and its source, arising experience for what it is, figure out how to do that, continue to intuit, explore, experience, be. (Sensations form constellations)

Reality has many dimensions, its a sphere we can subdivide, cut into pieces, we can use the pieces to create things, shapes, forms, objects, subjects, selves. The way we connect these things, the way we cognize and make sense, the way we wire sensations with desires, impulses, drives, the way those emerge higher understanding, models, realities. We construct reality, aware or unaware of how we do it. We move our body, choose our activities, consciously or unconsciously, there are many layers of understanding and interpretation, mechanics, explanations, sciences, consistencies, nature, invisible forces, perceived changes, cycles, repetitions, patterns. The conscious and unconscious inflect upon each other to polarize into individual experiences. (Their arrangement is arbitrary)

Do we have control? What is control? Is there such a thing as control? Reality flows, we make decisions, we think we make decisions, something makes decisions, we feel the drives within us, the impulses that adjust behavior, manipulate reality. Are we the ones doing it? The self, a constellation, accumulation of patters, ideas, behaviors, acquired tendencies, a reflection of the world it is apart of and yet distinctly itself, creating reality inside out and entangling itself with it, holistically interacting across multiple domains? Do I make decisions or am I simply a conglomerate of the cells that make me deciding as a hive, gut, heart, brain, the personalities within me, the arising desires. Even so, the problem doesn't dissipate, if my cells make the decisions, even then, that which I believe myself to be would simply adjust to be their emergent property, in a way it doesn't matter, since I'd still be every single one of these cells and the emergent, us making decisions or me really becomes the same thing, if will is made on a lower substrate, then the higher is not without will but a more complex expression. But that's just a theory, idea, will is an axiom, ascribed, the self is an axiom, and science is figuring it out under the assumption that it exists, there is something of a gestalt. (The ego is a gestalt)

Maybe the perceiver is an illusion, all these unique forces of nature align to create the gestalt I perceive, I believe myself to be. But the duality of a perceiver separates it from the perceived. Yet all it ever sees and knows and can experience is so by virtue of being an experience perceived, by definition not the perceiver. And yet, all of that appears to come out of the perceiver, or flow through it, it is entangled by virtue of being perceived. Let's collapse the duality of perceiver and perceived. In that case everything is perceived or perceiver, let's call it capital P Perception. Perception is being, experiencing, though what about the unperceived, unexperienced, the thoughts that pass through perception and disappear back into the subconscious/unconscious aether. (The duality of perceiver and perceived collapses)

There is a duality of the present experience as Perception and on the other hand the known to exist potential unactualized, dematerialized, hidden away. Of all the possible experience, one possibility is currently the case in Perception. Imagine blue, imagine red, now blue is gone but its still in the local subconscious, we can bring it back out, shuffle those two, combine them, but there is much more in the yet unconscious, random ideas we can remember, associate, spawn, an elephant, where did it come from? It wasn't there, now it is. (There is a vast hidden reality beyond the current Experience)

Nothingness is the guitar string at rest, in tension, in its original formlessness, without sound, without experience, no action, pure being, all contained, itself empty, Shiva. Objects, ideas, the omni-dimensional fabric of reality, unentangled, pure, detached, without form, without purpose, without assumption, axioms, impulses, unease, tension, drives creating conflict and pursuit, the feeling of separation, the duality of selfishness and selflessness, of love and hate and apathy, and the entropy towards Unity. The ultimate nothing, the nothing that excludes itself, the idea that goes meta, cuts its tail and self-annihilates. The kundalini that burns all karma, the freedom of being content, fulfilled, untangled, of being where one wants to be, more even, the collapse of all dualities create a no-space, no-distance, everything already is, nowhere to go, nowhere to be, a singularity that merges all and annihilates all distance. Now there is no story, no protagonist, no world, no being nor non-being, neither isness nor non-isness, when all dualities, all pointers collapse themselves. (Nothingness collapses all forms into the base state)

Nothingness is the realization that any constellation of experience is possible, that any arrangement of forms is arbitrary. That any desire connects itself to other sensations creating a gestalt. Forms keep themselves afloat, they link and associate themselves to other forms, creating pathways, roads, directions, cycles, stories, experiences, dependent arising/origination whose contrast creates an actual Duality that correspondingly spawns the idea of itself, through identification of the inherent difference of perception, which is created inside out through sensory perception, but on a larger scale the universe really takes that form in order for it to become the experience of an individual to be processed and interpreted further. But that actuality is a higher form of the same phenomenon, invisible forces, laws of physics, dependent origination, complexifying and turning itself into self-perceiving observers made conscious through the perception of those more universal forms. There is consciousness and within it infinite forms. (The universe splits itself into dualities and experiences itself through entities)

This isn't a reason to despair into nihilism, nihilism ultimately inflects upon itself and dissolves as well. Purpose is self-determined, socially expanded/contextualized/harmonized, God a dreamer across infinite dimensions, lifeforms arrange themselves creating tendencies and desires, exploring the universe. We use senses to create ourselves, cognition to understand ourselves explicitly, through intuition implicitly, our brain is both dual and non-dual, left and right hemisphere, order and chaos, form and creativity that arises from the formless. We are created and on a higher level create ourselves, our awareness of the process is variable, dualities form different interpretations and collapse into higher self-understanding. (We create and experience ourselves through dualities and exist independently in the formless)

We build systems, sciences, mathematics, physics, biology, they are self-contained systems, maps, a conceptual reflection of reality, a variable progressing technical mechanistic understanding, we try to unite them through formulas, strive to achieve complete consistency. Reality is outside of that, it is Meta. We use these rules to understand correlations, to manipulate reality, but reality can always go meta, can always be more. In a new realization, it itself becomes the past, a lens of perception, interpretation, correlation, constellation. But it is cut off from the ever rejuvenating present that transcends it and expands itself non-linearly by creating new patterns that are retroactively integrated, universal intelligence, Chitta. (Systems are self-contained mechanically consistent models that correspond or correlate with specific aspects of reality, but reality is infinitely more meta)

Pragmatically, we keep ideas, models, relations in our mind, but there is a force capable of instant understanding, the source of creation, a cosmic intelligence that leads one to understand what a thing is in itself, unmeasured by contrast, untainted by preference, bias, desire. I am attached to models, understanding, but there is a force that transcends and skips all that by going beyond and becoming the thing it seeks to understand, foregoing all the complicated dualistic calculations that try to understand a thing through its correlation with other things. An awareness, that sees and knows, an intuition that feels, a top-down understanding and the more I break away from creating systems, that more I access it, but its always beyond. If I want to create something in this dualistic world, then I conceptualize, associate and relate what I know, then use this knowledge to create. But to use this transcendent intelligence is go straight to the source of one's desire and work top down, breaking the top holon into the simplest pieces necessary to replicate it and discovering new patterns in the process. (There is a cosmic top-down intelligence that arises spontaneously to those with an empty mind)

One has goals, dualities created for the pursuit of happiness, but the pursuit itself creates separation, and yet that pursuit itself is the result of a previous state of unhappiness, it is an attempt to solve it, but it is a separate overlay, a distinction created to externally resolve a corresponding projected image of an internal state. That internal state however is a result of one's own self-understanding and psyche, self-image, the belief that the external shall inform the internal, that internal feelings ought to correspond to external achievements or environments. This dichotomy itself is the problem, internal states are self-regulated, self-imposed, self-determined, it is simply the lack of consciousness that prevented one from seeing that all internal feelings are a self-determined correspondence to external reality. Wants and desires are subconsciously wired to the allowance of the experience of happiness, initially they are wired for survival, after this when a model of reality is constructed in childhood, reality is far more variable and flexible, but with oughts/shoulds and expectations a pattern of gratification, of conditioned happiness is developed, assumed objective, assumed real, believed into existence, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a blindspot, a mechanic system of beliefs but greater reality transcends the limitations that the ego loses itself in. (Happiness is natural state that the ego separates itself from through conditions)

Unity -> Duality -> Arrangement -> Interpretation -> Systems -> Consistency -> Mechanics -> Knowledge -> "Facts" -> Ego

Ego -> Adaptation -> Exploration -> Change -> Transience -> Dynamicism -> Awareness -> Ego-Death -> Non-Duality -> Unity

The world we see is an arrangement of many patterns, physically seeming properties, idea constructs, but they're dynamic, they reference an ever morphing system. Any idea, word, sentence is an attempt, a pointer towards an aspect of reality, ideas are absolute by themselves as definitions but are really just a map, not the territory. There is a process that creates the very ideas separate from territory. There is a process that creates the very territory itself. And there is a process that correlates the territory with maps and brings those maps into awareness as a bridge, (The map is not the territory but the process that allows for the creation of maps is quite fascinating)

Everything is actual but some things are more directly actual than others.

Actual Nothing -> Actual Something -> (Actual) Idea of Something -> (Actual) Idea of Nothing

Though this is still a duality, if the territory is the truth, then the map is part of the territory, The map is a subset of the territory that creates a systemized reflection through available mechanisms. And then there is the territory itself, an uninterpreted, unsystemized non-dual experience of something that can be described through a thousand lenses and gives rise to any and all interpretations and creates a dozen dualities. The experience itself: "Actuality", of course actuality is a duality, or it can be used as such, clearly by the very fact of the existence of a word, it points to something and by pointing to something it points away from somewhere else. Actuality as a duality points to that territory from which all maps arise, it points away from the maps and onto the thing itself left uninterpreted. The greater capital Actuality however encompasses the map and dissolves the duality, the focus dissipates, everything becomes experience, including the process of creating maps and the maps themselves, the duality and objectification of the separation disappears. Everything becomes the territory, but that fact can only be understood by transcending the journey from where one stands, which is often from inside the duality that is to dissolve. (The map is actually a subset of the territory and merges with it in Non-Duality)

In summery, Non-Dual Nothingness is the fabric of all being, it takes forms creating dualities and distinctions, creating objects and subjects and maps that are a subset of reality, any one thing can be interpreted in a million ways by a million lenses through association, distinction, pattern recognition. When Non-Dual Nothingness is paired as a duality with Non-Dual Infinity, that duality itself can be dissolved into a larger Non-Duality. Where everything is only and ever itself, all contexts can arise and are themselves as well. A superposition of any thing, a superposition of any combination, a superposition of any interpretation. A superposition of every pattern, the combination of any pattern with any other pattern in any constellation in relation to any other constellation, in any form or time, or relation, or entropy, contextualized and actualized in the infinite dream. (Nothingness and Infinity are two sides of the same coin and that coin itself is a superposition of anything and everything in any context and every context infinitely interconnected and intermerged in relation and contrasted to any and all other possibilities. To go meta is to transcend and include and the ultimate meta is that which transcends and includes everything including nothing and itself)

Edited June 20, 2024 by Keryo Koffa