Stranger Sutra

Preamble  

The stranger proclaims: To you, World, I refuse. 

The stranger is adept at identifying and resisting alienating representations. 

The stranger proclaims: To you, World, I give.

By means of interminable negation the stranger reinvigorates being and thought in the face of the void—radical immanence; empty reality; para-zero; the axiomatic; the quasi; the apophatic; the dark night; the desert; the philofictional Real.

The stranger transfuses the symptom, exposed in the yearning embrace of the curative fantasy of ideological self-sufficiency, into a sovereign discernment for going forward. 

Transfusion occurs in subjective submersion. We are speaking here of the decomposition that precedes bioremediation. We are speaking here of the inalienable poverty that begets the stranger.

Postulate 

Sunk in inalienable poverty, the stranger emerges fit for the clash with Hell.

Practice: Decomposition with Breathing 

Now, go to an isolated place. Sit down, and straighten your body. Establishing immanental awareness right where you are, breathe in, simply aware, then breathe out, simply aware. Continue:

I breathe in, knowing I am breathing in. I breathe out, knowing I am breathing out.

I breathe in, sensitive to my entire body. I breathe out, sensitive to my entire body.

I breathe in, aware of my emotional climate. I breathe out, aware of my emotional climate.

I breathe in, cognizant of mental oscillation. I breathe out, cognizant of mental oscillation.

I breathe in, observing the arising of the breath. 

I breathe out, observing the dissolution of the breath.

I breathe in, experiencing deep connection. 

I breathe out, letting go.

Warning

Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person and is of benefit to society. But only if it remains an insufficient practice. When taken as sufficient, it conspires with the New Age Apocalypse. That is the name for a pernicious Idea circulating within “spiritual” ideologies from time immemorial. It names a cataclysmic shift in this and that consciousness, a shift which augurs the dawn of an eternally utopian World. Decisive to this conceit is the fact that the new world comes into being not through collective social action or through revolutionary operations on material structures, but rather precisely through such a “shift in consciousness.” That is the first warning… Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person and is of benefit to society. But only if it remains on the side of the living. When applied as a pharmakon for mystical death, for the annihilation or alteration of consciousness, or even for the imaginary plenitude of calm contemplation, it conspires with the Spiritual Death Drive. In the pile-driving brutality that is our current capitalist reality, we are lulled to the shores of nirvanic quietude. This is the second warning. 

Commentary

Decomposition with breathing is rich in results for the person and is of benefit to society. It places the practitioner in the teeming ruin where person and World intersect and transfuse. The soil of this ruin is brimming with the fungal mycelia that produce the electrifying flows—biological, psychological, mythological, narratological, ideological—that we call existence. We vigorously apply a fiction: What unfolds in the ruin of our practice is like the process of bioremediation, whereby, through organic decomposition, contaminants are eradicated from the soil. Be clear: remediation is not a metaphor for spiritualized purification. Think, rather, stimulation and augmentation of earth-incrusted organic matter.

That’s it.

And then, the stranger leaves the ruin.

Toward what end?

To struggle against the powers of the World.

To clash with Hell.