🪟 30 - Inner Space Exploration
Frame & Axiom #30 (Part 4): On encountering mystery, and going inside oneself.
Writer’s Note: After smashing out 29 parts in 57 weeks, I ran into a writer’s block, and in all frustration, lost my gumption to write. Hence, my lack of writing over the past 8 weeks.
Well… I also did move jobs into a new space (Web3) and relocate interstate from Sydney to Melbourne, and these make up altogether for a perfectly acceptable excuse for not writing. If only I didn’t know deep down that that’d be dishonest. I stopped writing not because I had no time to write, but because I had written too much, and none of it was resonating.
On that, here is a little excerpt from my journals, which I shared with a writers community I’m a part of, in a #feels channel.
Sporadically over the past 8 weeks, I tried sitting down on my laptop, quieting my mind and cracking my fingers, testing to see if the gumption might return. But as soon as I reread my essay to comprehend the mess I had left off with, my frustration would be reinstated.
I really have to get across all of this? That’s mad. How did I even get here?
Should I scrap everything and start over? No, I don’t have that freedom. I have to bridge this to where it came from, and where I need it to go.
[reads closely] What the hell did I write over here? What was I thinking?
[zooms out] Ah, this was where I became lost within my own sea of concepts before.
(And after a couple instances of this, I’d have no feeling left in me to actually write the damn thing.)
Facing this, I wasn’t going to force myself to write. I don’t think that’s the right approach to writing. All the self-improvement talk around “productivity and habit-building” or “get sh!t done” is not conducive to creative projects. The soul does not conform to anything but itself! I don’t write out of system or habit. I write because my mind is racing and my soul is desperate for a canvas.
It felt as if I could only kneel down and wait to be re-enchanted by the Writing Spirit, if I were to keep this going. And so I refused to write again, until I needed to. (I did, however, use the newfound time to read — and during this time, I managed to complete my reading of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Fear and Trembling (both absolutely legendary in my books), and I’ve now started on Spinoza’s Ethics (which is boring as hell).)
And now, at last! … after 8 weeks of creative drought, the urge to write — that immutable urge — is finally seeping back. Thank heavens! I missed this. I don’t even have any idea how or why this is the case. The “healing” quality of time, perhaps. You might be wondering what this urge looks like, practically? It looks like me typing voraciously on my phone anytime and anywhere, regardless of whether I’m on the train on the way to work, freshly awoken on my bed, or answering nature’s call on the toilet bowl. And now, I’m finally able to get this damned essay/chapter out the door.
Second note: in order to help myself follow my own writing, I began linking words, phrases and concepts that point to something I’ve established before. I realise that would be helpful for my readers to track where I’ve come from and where I’m going too. You’ll notice them as you read on below.
Table of contents
PART 1: NATURE » on the relation between man and nature: man as feeble and the consequence of forces.
PART 2: COURT OF JUSTICE: » on the relation between man and justness: reality as court and canvas.
PART 3: HOUSE OF MIRRORS » on the relation between man and others: the necessity of love and compassion toward the ill, that is, us all.
PART 4: EXISTENTIAL LETTERS
Inner Space Exploration
🪟 30 - Inner Space Exploration
Dear Inquirer,
Reality has a petrifying quality. There is an Otherness to it that you cannot annihilate by the sword of science. Left untreated, it can be overwhelming. This is not shocking, given that the nature of consciousness is solitary (notice how you experience everything to yourself, and how everyone else is “everyone else”) — and so mystery emerges like a ghost, with the fullness of its disconcerting powers. Yes! That is precisely what mystery is, a ghost that arrives like a thief in the night 1, not with the tenderness of a mother, but ghastly, by the horror of totalising incoherence.
Now this Otherness has made itself known to you, my dear inquirer, and it has arisen not from some extraterrestrial realm, but it is as if the factions have conspired from within your own kingdom. It is no wonder then that in the face of mystery, the formless ‘Void’, even the most stoic among us squirms in spirit. To gaze straight into the eyes of mystery is to agitate those alarm bells of disunity and incoherence. She arouses confusion in all directions, and her inward posture becomes uptight and fearful, and if she is given over to it, she becomes dispirited. As she doubts everything, so she doubts her own self. Consequently, she is alienated from herself. On what grounding are her two feet planted? It is a ground that gives way, as if what was once heavy and opaque suddenly dissipated into translucence, and she could only fall through it for eternity, screaming forever, for nothing caves to her flailing.
When Seneca said “we suffer more in imagination than in reality”, he was right, except, what he did not get was that imagination encircles everything, and its effect is precisely this universal terror of existence. Experience should testify that encountering mystery changes you. If only you could simply walk away from it, perhaps erase it from memory! A ghost, upon once entering the frame, remains always a ghost. First, it relishes in all its ghastly horror. Then, it is a ghost that lurks, as if cowering in the shadows, waiting to pounce at any opportune time, when it found you alone and most vulnerable in spirit. Have you ever wondered why a ghost is that which emerges from shadows? Have you wondered why a child’s reflex is to scurry to turn on the lights, in order to gain vision? She fears what she cannot apprehend; she fears a ghost; she fears the embodied unknown. Sensing the unknown, horror is the initial response, one that is concentrated in the immediate, and angst is the consequent response, one that is drawn out over time, for then the ghost lurks in the shadows, not allowing itself to be apprehended in any shape or form. Horror precedes angst — and they are the lifeblood of discomfort, that disconcerting sense of mystery that permeates all of existence.
You would not choose to shun it, then, or treat it as if it never happened, since it will only keep reannouncing itself, each time all the more thorough in its movements. Indeed, I implore you to attend to it, inquirer, lest mystery cripples you with dread, and have you fear solitude as if re-entering your house was returning to a haunted house! No, for the sake of your peace, you have to find a way to calm those erratic alarm bells. You want to get properly acquainted with these movements.
Fortunately, inquirer, you have been equipped for this task. You may unearth the patterns, the movements, by which mystery reveals itself. You only have to examine its territory, in the same way you might perhaps acquaint yourself with the true nature of a dragon best by probing where it is true to itself, in its lair, except that the lair was a hidden room inside your own house. Yes! — you only have to go inside yourself.
…
Inquirer, what you are really looking for is to construct a new, deeper kind of relationship with the one within, that is, yourself. By “yourself”, I refer to “you” not as in the you in relation to others, for this I have already discussed at length, and we are more easily predisposed to it — after all, that is how you developed as a child, you firstly appropriated what you were in relation to your parents, in relation to your environment, in relation to objects, but then as you matured, you began appropriating what you were in relation to yourself. This goes for you, inquirer, who are you in relation to yourself? I refer to the one you encounter most piercingly in solitude, your solipsistic consciousness alienated from the community, the core part of you that seeks in everything the alleviation of its own loneliness. Here lies the dragon’s den — the dwelling of ghosts!
Reality unfolds itself to you. All things proceed from you. Therefore, as a container of the infinite, cultivating a deeper relationship with yourself means cultivating a deeper relationship with everything. You want to have the roots of your familiarity touch the deepest trench of the ocean bed, reaching down into your own inner Mariana Trench, not reaching halfway down nor grounded in the shallow waters, for then you would be unmoored by the thought of an infinite ocean and its monsters below you, as were the Jews in the days of Christ 2. Yes! — See how the unsettling sense of mystery has you hovering over infinitude. Angst is a doorway. A doorway into the deepening and enriching of all things. Inquirer, you stand at the point between the trivial and the ultimate.
The descent into yourself in order to probe life’s mysteries will produce chaos to the greatest degree, this I can promise. (Would we dare expect anything less from facing the terror?) But I can also promise profoundness and sublimity of the finest quality. The preoccupation with the inward, in which the courting of mystery is presupposed, is a wellspring so rich, that it is as if in its own deepening, life takes on a renewed essence and form. In this sense, to put a spin on Socrates’ words, it is the examined life that is worth living or re-living3. It is to become a soul who lives “more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously”4. This is a proclivity blessed by the eternal, for it is an orientation most affirmative towards life’s own spirit. It is to gaze at life as a man gazes at a woman he loves, offering the fullness of his attention, positing her under the brightest possible light, in order that he might fully make out and entangle himself with her multiplicities, and so he could affirm her whole being with his poetry.
But even as life itself seems birthed from the womb of mystery, it is a subsequent and common error of framing to see life as a problem to be solved. Though life certainly poses mysterious questions, a justly lived life entails both just narration and just action. What do I mean by this? If life were lived merely as a problem, you would do justice to narration, but you would fall short at action, and suffocating action suffocates narration. One must attend to both the asking and the guessing. Had I attended to acting over narrating, there would be insufficient points at which I would have reflected on whether my acting was in good stead with reality or not. Correspondingly, had I attended to narrating over acting, I would be lost in self-deception, for with what little contents I had to narrate, I would have had to make up in crafty storytelling, in which I would give “the nerves and the fancy” too much room 5. Inquirer, ensure you do not lose yourself in the probing and the interrogations, such that you forget to live. Life is lived forward and understood backward 6, and you have to attend to both equally intensely.
This is why I affirm the posture of courting, of seeking acquaintance, as opposed to perhaps an overzealous grappling with truth. Juxtaposing both postures, that of acquaintance is not dissimilar to that of surrender. It is as if to say to a woman, Mystery! I cannot even conceive of understanding you, as a finite being I am far too weak for that. I shall submit to the thought that you contain your own infinitude, and seek to affirm it, not subsume it. I shall wait patiently for you to arrive. When you do, if you like, we can dance.
The call of the ultimate questions is for it to be posed with seriousness, but also for the relation to be allowed its development. What it does not call for is the blissful ignorance of a child, nor the overzealousness of a warrior. Indeed, for mystery sits at reality’s court of justice; she terrorises the unacquainted, haunts those who turn their back to her, and spits at those who place themselves above her. Answers to the ultimate questions must not be pursued, they must ensue. (Indeed, that is why we use the word “revelations” for answers of a certain weight, they are revealed, not attained.) Effective “intensity” then is not a figment of the will, of coercing, but a figment of love, of attending to, for no reason other than that it is simply called for.
Whereafter, the ghost who lurks will be given a language, and if you listen close enough to it, remarkably, you will be able to enter into a dialectic with it. That is acquaintance with mystery. It is then, that you will be at home in your own house. It is then that you will be fully engaged with the great forces of life, for you have befriended the ghastly monsters on the ocean floor, the existential unknowns, upon which they then ceased to be ghastly, for they became friends. Inquirer — you only have to go inside yourself! Mystery stands at the door. See to it that she welcomes you in. I trust your soul will direct you where to begin.
Till next time,
Euwyn
Book-writing note: I am heavily considering changing the title ‘Frames & Axioms’ (which was always more of a placeholder title) to ‘Letters to an Inquirer’. I’d love to hear any thoughts.
2 Timothy 4:7-8 (ESV)
The Jews of Jesus’ time, having descended from desert nomads, believed that the sea was a reservoir of evil forces. Hence the negative symbolism of the sea, notably, as the home of the terrible dragon Leviathan, which came to symbolise the pagan nations opposing Israel.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
“Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is in the spirit that it is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.” — Pessoa
"Lacking external experiences, those of the inward life will gain the upper hand. The nerves and the fancy then take up too much room. Every external happening seems colossal, and frightens us. We begin to fear life.” — Dostoevsky
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” — Kierkegaard