For a bit, my life was time compressed in the eternal now, but not by way of being in harmonious flow with the present.

Instead it was characterized by a protracted nothingness.

Cocooned by nullified thoughts and feelings.

Not necessarily marked by a dull and constant numbing melancholy.

Typically in periods like these, others would be reflexively compelled to contemplation.

But it was the opposite for me.

Alone with but not deeply and fully engaged with the self.

It was a shallowness of feeling and thought that paradoxically betrayed a heaviness of being.

In some circles, a zen-like emptiness of being is fetishized where non-attachment is ironically the goal of existence. Of course, there are different modes of emptiness. But the one I’ve experienced is not the one they’re coveting.

Not a peace but a standstill.

Not a zen but an amniotic suspension.

Not a harmony but rather a spectre-like haunting of the spaces I inhabit.

This dulling quietude was both a function of the change in lifestyle and an intense inner necessity.

So I can’t say I regret it. I’ve always had a romance with my solitude and just like many romances, it is characterized by its vicissitudes of ecstasies, tumult, plateaus, and peaceful harmony.

And I would say this emptiness reaffirmed my need for vitality. Not by way of desire but through necessity just like how a starving person needs food.

Like non-attachment, in some ways the will of desire is often fetishized in contrast to necessity which is often seen as acting primarily from severe lack. Desire is also characterized by a sense of lack but the emphasis is on the vigor of the will.

I guess the differentiation can stem from abundance (in regards to desire and it’s manifestation through will) vs privation (in regards to necessity) and the range and the degree of choice these things emerge from.

Necessity illuminates the essential features of the self while desire can blur the line between what’s essential and what’s distortion.

Of course, it would be faulty to pit the two against each other in that desire is in some degree rooted in necessity, but not all necessity is rooted in desire. As you know, we don’t always desire what we need but we begrudgingly accept it because it completes a vital component of who we are.

I don’t feel the same as I did yesterday, as today I’m crawling on my knees, viewing the world as bigger, slanted, and more uncanny, and looming over me, the sun turning to black. Threatening to rip the seams that hold everything together, the fissures leave me open for penetration as I’m preparing to be burned by the black sun of dark enlightenment.

The dynamic between daylight and the darkness of the eclipsed sun brings up images and concepts of knowledge and experiences that overwhelm and madden the mind, but a phase that’s only available for a limited period of time. Knowledge and experiences that destroy the ego, but if one is strong enough, one is able to reconfigure oneself into something more powerfully evolved. I dream of the primordial darkness engulfing the entire world, an endless continuity between everything, and the light piercing through the darkness and the self. The light forms both the connecting tissue and a schism between the darkness and I. It introduces emergence and strength from the primordial shadow and a connected multiplicity.

The black sun, the dark season of the soul, commences in order to both remind us of our origin and to bring us to the horizonless continuity between the core forces of life and death. As these forces reconfigure us and coalesce, the eclipse fades away and the light pierces through illuminating our new form.

Is its defilement.

To defile it is to make the sacred profane.

What was once elevated is now abject.

The sacrament that was once made holy.

Is now a symbol of decadence gone decay.

To juxtapose two totemic extremes.

Is to foreground and elevate

Each other’s fundamental truths.

Sometimes I’m left speechless, not out of surprise but because the limits of language, especially the English language, can’t quite capture the sublimity of certain moments. Language is a tool for the narrative and logical ordering of experience, and some things are beyond categorizations. Some experiences tap into the pre-verbal and pre-conceptual part of our perception in that we can’t do anything except take them as they are. It forces us to not experience ourselves as extended and mediated in time but rather to experience ourselves as pure Being – being in the now, in flow with the thing or person we’re experiencing. It’s a paradoxical situation in that our world condenses and is distilled in that moment but at the same time it anagogically opens up the agent (you the subject) and arena (the environment) relationship through a novel experience of reality.