bob's blog

The creative force.....suspended in nothing.

I was reading Sartre’s essays last January under the meager light of 12 volt electrics and failing daylight. The fact that I mixed in some Mt. Gay and tonic made the task even more daunting. I tried propping myself on an elbow and lay there horizontal under the sway of the hook. The pillow inching closer by the instant. I read and reread a sentence or two and stopped to ponder.

Contemplating life’s mysteries while suspended in a meditative trance.

Life floats on a bed of nothing. The creative dynamic force that drives the universe suspends all on nothing. The various branches of living organisms march down different pathways of light emanating from the luminous being at the center of darkness which is the vast vestibule of nothing. Some proceed on a course that allows their style of being to thrive for eons consuming their way on a steady diet of things born of no thing, some die off being the fodder that promotes another style of being. Not necessarily superior/inferior, decidedly consumer/consumed.

It’s difficult to image being from no thing. How could that be. Is god a thing or a no thing?

Lao Tsu talked of “all that there is and all that is not there. Sartre talked of being and nothingness. “What being will be must of necessity arise on the basis of what it is not.”

“Being is that and outside of that, nothing.”

I bought a wonderful print recently of “Buddah Falls” a mirage created from a photo of a waterfall that was constructed of two mirror images split down the middle. It’s difficult to convey the mystery that is contained in the scene. I looked at it in awe thinking that some high religious culture created the scene out of natural rock and used it as some spiritual ritual, a coming of age ritual or enlightenment ceremony. A truly monumental endeavor to make the waterfall as natural looking as possible with visions of the Buddah emerging from the mist and splashback from the water’s interaction with stone.

I was devastated to discover that it had been just a waterfall in real life that was doctored to make it perfectly symmetrical. The mystery returned when I suspended my disbelief and saw it for what it truly was. The Buddah emerging from no thing.

God is the boundary layer between darkness and the nothingness that resides there and everything that we perceive, intuit, feel and imagine. God is a kind of filter between what is not and the immense potential of what can be. The big plan, if there is a big plan, is for life to twist, turn, reconfigure, die off and be reborn in myriad colorful and imaginative configurations. A kaleidoscope of chemical compounds that twist into double helixes, detach and re-configure in huge complexities using only guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine as code pairs to build DNA chains that contain all the potential to be. Outside of that there is no thing. Potential un-achieved, languishing in darkness.

All of the cells in the human body can be operating as a well oiled machine one moment and achieving potential, imagining the wherefrom, when poof, the fire in the belly goes out, the sun dries the remaining lifeless body into water vapor, dust and ashes. The life goes from now here to no where.

The light shines on, perceived by the body in motion, the godhead, the source of being, disparate, separate, making, coagulating, un-making, de constructing.

For what purpose but to be here now, and not to be here then, in the same style.

God is a body stylist, assuming the form of a dinosaur, dying off to resurrect as a flying insect that morphs into a wormlike grub, living under ground for 12 years like the Cicada only to emerge and devour the wheat fields that would otherwise have supported the human specie. For what reason but to keep the wheel of life spinning new and interesting things from air, water, sunlight and no thing. Pure energy, before movement in molecules can point to it.

If energy is discernible movement on a molecular scale, God is the most hyperactive individual that has ever and will ever exist. Made of all the molecules in the observable Universe (if you can’t see them, do they make noise?) coming together and moving apart at the speed of light. A huge constant collision, the impact of which can be detrimental to your consciousness.

It’s all there in the waterfall, that is pictured in the works of Escher, constantly flowing, yet always there still.

I’m the little guy on the second balcony, looking around. Or then again maybe I was just a figment of my imagination.

Bob