On the Misrepresentation of Larry Goldstein

Tell me of the joys you seek. Tell me of your dreams. Tell me of the sensual delights to which you would have your body exposed. Tell me of the material objects whose ownership you place on such a mighty pillar. Tell me what you’re looking for. The women, the cars, the thrill of danger, of the potential of losing it all. Tell me of the excitement that you take from power, from influence over the lives of other men or the movement of dead matter. But do not tell me in words.

Tell me of these things in the language of being. Describe the nature of deep sensory experience that underlies all things. It is a difficult task, but not impossible. Begin with a vocabulary. First describe who it is that wants these things. Who are you? Are you a head? Are you a neck? Describe to me the difference; describe it through the tactile perception of your own body. Draw a line. Feel the line. Is it there? Feel the depths of tissue and bone that you believe construct your body. But set aside your words. Set aside the visual images that so rule our daily lives. Set aside everything you have thought before about your head and feel it. Can you feel it? Can you feel its boundaries? Can you feel an outside? What are the spatial limitations of this perception? Do they exist?

What is it that wants these things? Look inside you, can you find a desire for wealth? Can you feel an urge to destroy? Can you feel your fear? Where are they?

I have to remind myself sometimes that it is ok to just sit. It is ok to lie in my bed. I don’t need to be “doing” something all the time. I don’t need to be pursuing a goal, there is no danger of “wasting” my time because everything is already complete. Everything is perfect, everything is finished, and nothing is ever done. All things are in a constant state of transformation because transformation is itself the nature of all “things.” Change, impermanence, creation, destruction, creation, destruction, the symphonic rediscovery of the universe by the universe provides the subtle undertone of all experience, all being.

It is curious, this belief that things are not as they should be. That the universe is anything but perfect, anything but what it should be, and that its correction lies within our personal agency is a source of untold and unending suffering. It is the reason we are afraid to sit still, afraid to wait.

People sometimes speak of the many schizophrenias of Western culture. I am told that our society persists only by clinging to many antithetical philosophies at once, and that they are tearing us apart as individuals. Perhaps such a case of this is to be found in our zealous belief in the power of “free will,” of personal agency and self-determination, set alongside the cause-and-effect thinking that rules scientific experimentation. Perhaps we will find some sweet release in the ambiguousness of quantum phenomena. Or perhaps we are fooling ourselves.

Is it conceivable that a single idea—and an idea alone, not publicized or evangelized or used to topple governments, simply realized—would be sufficient to tear apart the fabric of the universe and bring it to an end, as it has ended so many times before?