14 november 2011
Śūnyatā
It was all there in the banality
of our existence. It was what allowed us to let go, drop into a state of
perpetual free-fall that we took to with a flashing of the teeth. We became
savages drunk off the glory of self-idolatry. We cared for nothing, lived for
no greater good; emotion was left to become a dusty book-end upon which leaned
self-gratification. With no physical boundary or attack of morality or
conscience to stop us we became the pagan gods of our own self-worship.
Hardship became meaningless as was life as was death. Only pleasure and pain
insidiously brewing in a lethal cocktail could quench whatever it was that we
felt. And often our own pain was not enough. Perhaps calling us monsters would
not be sufficient but then again the idea of sufficiency in the world that we
lived in and eventually the one that we created as a substitute, simply became
empty. Nothing was sufficient in our initial modern tragedies and nor was
anything adequate in the malicious comedy that we crafted for ourselves. We
were not lost causes, nut-jobs, sob stories or anything of that manner. Our
realities were only what we made them, be it in the office or in the forests;
no matter the amount of substance abuse that we subjected our bodies to it was
all our creation, not that of hallucinations or ethereal incantation. Man is a
simple creature, but nowadays the world is not inhabited by men or creatures
even, only vessels for a greater jest. Did we become men in our endeavours?
Probably not, but the point was and remains so that we simply did not care.
Modern life had become a charade; we could all see the frantic movements of
civilization but could not understand the meaning. Conceivably the grander
meaning that humanity looked for was just non-existent, or maybe was sitting
right under our noses. But what we looked for was not meaning or a greater
understanding of what it meant to be truly human. What we looked for was
something different entirely, what we were looking for we found and it
destroyed us. We looked everywhere, travelled from the realms of pens and
fax-machines to the domain of the fire-tongue sky. We needed no Bodhi Tree, no
proverbs or scriptures. Only our own self destruction. And eventually we found
it.
We found it.
We found it.
We found not anything but our own
nothingness.