2024-05-21 Journal Entry

Created: May 22, 2024 5:36 AM Tags: Daily

I’m starting to get high so this will likely be some nonsense. I don’t really know why I felt like getting high today. I’ve been in a loop lately where I’ve been getting high or had some drinks quite often lately, but I always end up hating it tomorrow and skipping it for a day now that I’ve dispised it. And now I’m sitting here thinking these things are teachers — I’m sitting here feeling equanimous with the text and I feel like I’m putting my meditation to good use.

I’m sure I’ll read this tomorrow and it won’t make sense.

Nowadays I don’t feel like responding to people. I don’t like going out into public really, not for fear but mostly out of dislike. So many things seem uninteresting, so many details I’m going to lose. I need things in broad strokes, things that grow slowly and that I only realize that they grow slowly once they’re grown. I need trees and mountains and quiet. There’s this feeling when I’m high that feels like enlightenment. I’m enlightened here right now. I can see everything, and I see nothing in everything. It’s all just here, happening. Look! Look! Stop and look! Not-going is in the going. Doing is not-doing all the way down. And what it does isn’t really there. Look! The mu story is bullshit because he could have said anything! Every word is a koan, every reference is nothing. We’re here! There we go!

There’s some dirt on my window that looks like the buddha.

Two paragraphs back reads like those old buddhist masters shouting nonsense. I don’t always see what the nonsense they’re talking about is, but I can see where it comes from. Doing is not-doing; everything is arising and passing all the time. Even my fingers on this keyboard are doing everything but also nothing.

Sometimes I feel like a terrible Luddite for what I wrote at the start about nature and all of that.

We’re both a particle and a wave. We’re here, right here, our body and mind all in this present moment. There’s color, there’s sound. We feel our chest rising and falling with the breath. And we’re a wave, or maybe more like those electron clouds, the aggregate shape of the places we probably are. There’s you right here and then there’s your history, your future, your personal light cone of possibilities.