Groundlessness

What if our lives are as pointless as we fear?

We often feel we should work hard to create something of value or amount to something. Especially in more developed societies, there is a common sense that we should “keep our eyes on the prize” or invest ourselves wholly into the best finished product. After we finish our work, we think, then we can rest.

Of course, if we pause to consider the reality of our world — that whatever we produce is either consumed in fleeting experiences of pleasure, or eventually decays; that we ourselves, no matter how much we work to take care of ourselves, will eventually die; that all life on our planet depends upon specific conditions that will one day cease to be — all of our efforts seem like vanity. In the face of the reality of impermanence, everything seems pointless. Many times when we recognize the futility of our striving, we react with denial and hyperdrive. We sense in a sort of peripheral awareness that “the jig is up,” and we strive to ignore it, or to beat it. We proclaim: “then we have to work harder!” To create even better, more lasting products, to extend our lives indefinitely through scientific progress, to explore and colonize new planets to perpetuate the human race. “We can’t give up!” we think. “We must do whatever we can to keep moving, to keep surviving, and improving and growing!” We throw ourselves harder into work and into consumption, trying more fervently to escape a gnawing awareness of the underlying futility of everything.

Ironically, despite hopeful rhetoric, such manic striving is inherently fatalistic, because it has as its root a sense of meaninglessness that terrifies us. In trying so desperately to escape the frightening instability and impermanence of our world, we cling to the fear of it, and an underlying sense of despair that we constantly renew and combat through all of our hard striving. But no matter how we try, we cannot erase a basic fact of existence. We may succeed at further extending our life expectancies or colonizing some other planets, but in this infinity of time and space impermanence will always be, and it will always be greater than our aims. Everything will begin, and everything will end — always.

And yet there is a poetic irony in that statement, that impermanence is permanent. There is an explosive power in that statement and a profound mystery. Impermanence is permanent: that is the common root of the deepest of Eastern and Western thought. Eastern philosophies have long observed impermanence as a central (and lasting) facet of spiritual practice. In much Buddhist practice, for example, we repeatedly observe that nothing is permanent. Western religions have generally taken the inverse focus, on the permanence of that which transcends the worldly and the realm of beginnings and endings. So the East has affirmed that all material is impermanent, and the West has affirmed that the immaterial is permanent.

The West, then, has centered its spiritual practices on faith and affirmation, and active experience of the immaterial. The East has centered its spiritual practices on careful skepticism and stripping away all that is false: rigorous observation of the ultimate emptiness of material. I imagine that both approaches have their pitfalls, but it is clear that in the West, faith and belief became confused, got out of hand to become muddled authoritarian assertions, and eventually provoked a backlash of skeptical and decidedly materialist assertions that form the secular, scientific worldview of our dominant global culture today. Western culture today is so focused on the concrete and material because it formed in reaction to a culture of derailed focus on the immaterial. And now we find ourselves amidst an assertive materiality that looks to immateriality and impermanence as, respectively, senseless and disturbing. Such is our context; such is our experience.

So we think we must strive to perpetuate existence — that which exists, that which has substance, that which matters. We think we must denounce the simple observation of reality as nihilistic when it elucidates the futility of our aims and threatens our sense of progress and meaning. We think we must defend our purpose and hope, however desperate, from the implications of impermanence, infinity and eternity. But what if we give up that fight and false hope, and accept reality? What if we allow our determined self-preservation to be defeated, as it were, by the magnitude of the universe? The denial of reality is, after all, the definition of delusion, and delusion can only cause suffering. Whenever we accept reality, there is great relief.

So our lives are pointless. So we’re all working hard to quickly consume the very products we toil to make, in a glib cycle of aimless stress and pleasure. So we will all die, so the planet will come to an eventual end, and our race too, and all is for naught. That’s the worst of it.

But if we look straight into that void, it’s also the very best of it. Everything is pointless, and in its impermanence amounts to nothing, because everything is actually an end in itself. We have confused the notions of consequence and meaning. Where we’ve been searching for quantitative importance, thinking that it all has to amount to something, the reality has been that it never will, because meaning has always been qualitative. Meaning has never been over there, in that special, eventual thing, but has always been here and everywhere, in literally everything.

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour”

— Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

If we truly look into the void, and let ourselves feel that all is closing in, that everything is meaningless and amounts to nothing — if we truly bring ourselves into this central existential crisis; if we move wholly into it, and then through it, not clinging to cynical despair but allowing our gnawing sense of reality to fully emerge — we are liberated. We see that the groundlessness and emptiness of inherent meaning in (or even separate existence of) any particular thing means that we ourselves have nothing, are nothing. We see that our own concepts of identity and senses of self are delusional. We see that in all the universe, there is nothing really finite or lasting, and in that sense there is no “thing” real. There is just shifting groundlessness, the undivided vibrant presence that we are, that everything ultimately is. Here words fail, as they indicate specific delineations, rather than the lack of them.

That vibrant presence of groundlessness is the living immateriality to which all religions point. It is divinity or the awakened self. It is who and what we are (pronouns particularly fail here). It is any creative or truly “productive” power we have ever had, stripped of a confused filter of frustrated striving and finite identification. Really, we are always that groundless presence, but most of us live in denial, trying to hold onto a sense of concrete meaning that doesn’t exist. So we deny ourselves the fullness of presence, or the total experience of what we are, of what is. So we run from here to there and back again in order to escape the simple and infinite peace of being.

Because being is itself deeply creative, resting in that pointless state of groundless awareness will not always be passive. Sometimes we will be passionately moved to act, to generate, to bring things into the world. But our activity then comes from a different space, not fighting against impermanence but erupting from it. In its passive state, groundless awareness is like a quiet ocean of potential energy, still and profound. But in an engaged and active state it can be electric, playful, almost tangible, like a whip or live wire. So deeper awareness is also deeper and more meaningful creative and generative power. In a groundless state of fulfillment, we are not trapped in passivity, but resting in whole, potential energy that we can engage outwardly, playfully and creatively, at any time. Life then becomes a constant play between resting fulfillment and ecstatic creation, and we are done with the drudgery of striving.

What is it to stop pushing, to stop running, and to look straight into the abject pointlessness of existence? What blossoming could there be in such radical sincerity? Whether or not you face it, you are ever amidst creative and boundless, beautiful groundlessness, always yours to inherit.

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