Sunday Morning Meditation
Lying here in the darkness of the early morning, the wind blowing outside, I bring to mind an awareness of death. I’m just out of an intense dream.
It is not that the things and concerns of life – not just my life, not just humanity’s life, but all instances and collectives of the living and dying- don’t matter. They neither matter nor don’t matter.
The world – the entirety of existence – embraces life and death, sentience and insentience, unity and plurality, harmony and dispersal in a super-integration that objective knowing can never pierce.
The darkness is inseparable from my present circumstance, but the darkness is not concerned with my life. The wind blowing is inseparable from my circumstance, but the wind is not concerned with my life.
The dream was my circumstance when I was dreaming, yet, in the dream I did not really exist; there was no real separation between dream objects and people and my dream-subjectivity. It was all consciousness. It might be more correct to say that the dream happened to me, that ‘I’ didn’t dream.
Death is inseparable from my existence, yet there too - will I really die, or will death happen to me?
Neither. All the above dualities pivot on the ego-consciousness which is an activity, not an entity. All is activity and change, and the activity that is the ego-consciousness produces dualities, and prioritises sides according to it's interests. Thus is ‘being’ prioritised over ‘extinction’ (even in Aristotelian ontology, and Hegelian dialectics is this so), progress over entropy, life over death, sentience over insentience. Understandable biases in understanding reality, but biases nonetheless.
Darkness, the wind, the dream and death; all are as real, as substantial, as illusory and insubstantial as being, as life, as life concerns and the ego that is so concerned and that objectifies them all. It’s all grasping and naming of the ungraspable and unnameable, and the totality includes both.
An edifying thought; let it be without being indifferent, without cleaving to such intense grasping (because it's not easy, nor probably even possible to stop grasping), without believing in the repulsiveness of things that repulse you, and without ignoring it all.