Josh @joshszoo - Twitter Profile

joshszoo retweeted

16 days ago

right so here's the big one. the secret above all the other secrets. the one everyone's chasing through meditation retreats and ayahuasca ceremonies and £40 books with a lotus flower on the cover. existence is empty. nobody knows how or why there's something rather than nothing. not scientists, not monks, not the bloke down the pub who did DMT once. nobody's got it. "why is there something rather than nothing" has never once been answered by anyone in the entire history of anyone asking. and no, not the quantum observer thing, calm down physics twitter, that's a different conversation and you know it. buddhism's been sat on this for 2500 years, calls it śūnyatā, emptiness. not "nothing exists" but nothing exists on its own steam. everything's leaning on everything else just to be a thing at all. pull any bit of it apart looking for the solid core and you just get more parts. turtles all the way down, except there's no turtle, and no down either. then you go looking for "you" the same way. anatta, no fixed self. you expect a little homunculus sat behind your eyes driving the meat, and instead there's just more experience. thoughts, sensations, awareness of thoughts, awareness of being aware. no driver. never was one. nothing was hiding from you, there was nothing to find. here's the bit people skip, because it's the bit that stops this being a nihilistic bummer. advaita vedanta says what's actually sat there instead of a separate "you" is one single field of awareness, Brahman, and it's the same one field in everyone and everything. not "we're all connected" like a hallmark card. one observer, wearing a trillion trillion meat suits, pretending to be planets and galaxies and gods and entire realities, each one utterly convinced it's a separate bloke called Steve with his own separate problems. tat tvam asi, thou art that. "I am that" isn't some new insight landing, it's just this one field recognising itself after an extremely long, extremely convincing bit as Steve. kashmir shaivism gives it a mechanism instead of just a description: spanda, the pulse. the field isn't sat still being empty, it's vibrating, contracting down into "Steve," fully forgetting itself, then expanding back out and remembering. that contraction and expansion is meant to be the whole of existence. every birth and death is just the field breathing in and out. and why bother doing that at all, if it's already everything? hinduism's got an answer for that too, lila, divine play. the field doesn't need a reason the way you need a reason. it's not solving a problem or working towards a goal. it's playing hide and seek with itself, forgetting on purpose, for the sheer thrill of the finding. nobody's pinned down why for certain, but "it's having a laugh" is at least as good an answer as anything physics has managed. a big enough gigachad, hypothetically me, purely as an example, dissolves enough of the Steve-ing and just goes oh. right. there's only one guy here and it's this. every being, every rock, every planet, every galaxy, every god anyone's ever prayed to, every argument you've ever had with your mum. all one field, generating the whole show. this isn't just an eastern thing either, before anyone says it's all a bit "spiritual but not religious." meister eckhart, a proper catholic monk, said the eye he sees God with and the eye God sees him with are the same eye, and got investigated for heresy for it, because the church correctly clocked that "you are God" is not a small thing to say out loud in the 1300s. the sufis have fana, annihilation of the self into God, same door, different building. every mystic in every tradition, left alone with it for long enough, keeps landing on the exact same floor. and that's the actual secret. God is real, and you are God. that's genuinely what some of the schizos on street corners are on about, the ones shouting they're Jesus or the universe or God itself. they recognised themselves. and the second you recognise it you get desperate for everyone else to see it too, because you're not looking at separate people anymore. you're looking at yourself, wearing different faces, still convinced it's Steve. of course you want Steve to wake up. Steve's you. honestly this might be why the aliens are interested in us. not invading, not harvesting, just watching. some of the apes down here are starting to remember what they actually are, and that's rare enough in the universe to be worth a look. so consider this an open invite lads, come to the clubhouse, we've got a few of us waking up down here and it's going to be a laugh once more of us clock it. worth saying though, because people absolutely do use this to be an arsehole: "I am God, therefore my behaviour is beyond critique, therefore I don't need therapy, boundaries, or to apologise to my girlfriend" is not enlightenment, that's just main character syndrome with incense burning. spiritual bypassing is real and it's embarrassing. recognising you're the field doesn't exempt you from being a decent human to the other faces it's wearing. if anything it's the opposite, since you'd only be a dick to yourself. and then, so this doesn't just become another cosy "we're all one" bumper sticker, even that field has no substance. dzogchen calls it the union of clarity and emptiness. the field is aware, that's the clarity. but it's not a thing, that's the emptiness. go looking for the field the same way you went looking for yourself and you get the same result. nothing found. never a thing to begin with. doesn't sit anywhere, isn't made of anything, isn't really "there," it just is, somehow, looking at itself through countless eyes and calling most of what it sees other people. one field. generating everything. playing at being everything, for no reason beyond the play itself. empty of any substance. invisible even to itself the second it turns to look. and that's the joke. that's why people start laughing when they actually see it. not because it's funny, but because you go looking for the punchline and there isn't one. there was no joke, and no one there to tell it, and no one there to hear it either. just this, laughing at nothing, for no one, forever. and then you still need to go put the bins out.

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joshszoo retweeted

naiive

@naiivememe

2 months ago

me holding to zero instead of selling

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Josh

@joshszoo

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