Alone In The Machine

The Clouding Of The Void

In any case, how far can you strip a human being of its entertainments and pleasures, it's habits and addictions, before they begin to think life is not worth living?

I've known love and sex and connection and meaning and now I'll always crave them. Had i not known them would i be better off? Blissfully unaware, merely surviving, being relatively content doing so? I think to a large degree, ignorance is bliss. When i didn't know love or sex and when i wasn't aware of myself i was happier or more content (or i would appear to be, whatever "I" means in this context)

When i was a child, when i was a mind with no attachments or past experience, everything was entertaining; but it's the ignorant and innate entertainment of an animal. I don't mean to diminish it, i think were all trying to get back there in some way and failing. I only mean to say it is the state of consciousness without an 'I', without attachment or experience, or a sense of self.

It seems unavoidable to create a self so i suppose the best we can do is to escape it through some pleasure or attachment. Yet inexplicably these attachments both provide escapes from the self and yet carve and cement it deeper. The pleasure and attachment of TV, of sex, love, smoking, drugs, religion, grand delusions of meaning. The whole spectrum of any escape from oneself.

Yet in some of these moments one can get a half glimpse of that old state of consciousness. That clear and present nothing where you melt away and desire ceases. It can only ever be a half glimpse because what can be recalled could not possibly have been fully present.

So is the ascetic a person who is blissfully ignorant? Does he simply just not know what he is missing? I think of myself before love, before sex, before smoking, and i wonder how that person got through the day without them as possibilities and realities. Yet its perfectly true i did, and with no recall of any particular trauma of missing it. I simply hadn't known it to miss.

Does a heroin addict look at me in the same bemused way i look at a non smoker, unable to imagine how I might make it through the day without it? And whose to say what level of pleasure or resignation one should take? Is it better to be an animal and never leave that state of consciousness, or to create a self with all its pleasures and attachments and personality- the whole endless circus of desire and attachment and pleasure and pain, to have all that and transcend it for a moment?

Which is better? A human largely incapable of being an animal, or an animal totally incapable of being human?

It seems impossible to live without being attached to something because living itself, pleasure itself, is the psychological filling of this void, which is oneself.

Attachment fills the void. Attachment is pleasure. I am attached to my bed, my relationships, the cinema, painting, i am attached to anything that makes my life easier or gives me pleasure. This attachment is the result of my being inwardly nothing, of my complete dependence on outward stimuli for the recognition of my existence. I am attached only to what gives me pleasure or an escape from myself and my meaningless existence, and as i am attached to these outward things, which are impermanent, i feel pain-something is missing, an escape, an attachment or pleasure has gone and i am reminded that i am nothing of myself. That i am simply a void dependent on outward things for the recognition of it's existence.

What is mind other than the accumulation of matter? What is a personality, a name, an experience, a belief, other than the clouding of that void?