Ask for nothing from life, save life alone.
That's the bare minimum, surely.
It may be the ground on which all
other desires can flower.
Being itself must come first.
What
is this being-in-itself? Being-alone?
Being erased of content?
Is
it more than a vanishing point in the distance?
Can we hold it,
let alone grasp it?
If the mind rubs out its own
baggage,
Won’t desire remain in an otherwise
desert Zenscape?
That desire to
expunge the self, Zen-like.
Or the Cartesian desire to keep to
the Cogito alone.
The desire to cut out the meat of the empirical
self.
Only a mind already throttled by Reason and Education
Would
want to rid itself of Reason and Education.
Rid itself of its
graduate’s robes.
It's only the Intellect itself – the
proud Intellect – which puts on a hair shirt
And whips itself
into nothingness.
But when the endpoint of
no-return is reached
How does the mystical/Cartesian
self-annihilator
Stop himself from following the markers back to
ego and contingency?
Won’t its treasures and temptations forever
call him back?
If thought is truly dead, or if all presuppositions are thrown out,
How does the
mystic/philosopher know he's in the Otherworld
Away from the world
of logic, sex and dog shit?
Wouldn’t he need an
experimental water chamber
In which he can float, without eyes,
ears and all the rest
Blocked from all things sensory?
A mystic
in a water chamber, like Plato in his cave,
May say no to sensory
distractions and temptations.
But wouldn’t the flood of memory
drown him still?
