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Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology, and Nihilism (Flipbook)
3 responses to “Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology, and Nihilism (Flipbook)”
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Glenn,
Your new pamphlet is a truly powerful and penetrating text, imbued with exceptional clarity. The depth of your analysis of “Buddhism as an ideological practice” and the unflinching courage with which you expose the “fact of dissolution” through meditation are truly impressive. You masterfully extract the needle from the grooves of conditioned meanings, revealing their “fakeness” with surgical precision.
Your bold assertion of nihilism as an inevitable consequence of a realistic view of reality, one indifferent to our “values” and “meanings,” particularly resonates. It’s a powerful invitation to intellectual honesty and liberation from self-deception.
However, in reading about “dissolution,” which you describe as an “unrelenting and inevitable” fact, a question arises for me, continuing your line of thought: what happens after we fully embrace this analytic collapse and release all inherited meanings and goals?
If meditation is an “organon of dissolution,” exposing everything “on the surface of things,” what occurs when this “surface” is seen in its pure, indifferent reality? Is it possible that precisely within this complete acceptance of “meaninglessness and purposelessness” (which you call “an increase in intelligibility”) lies the space for a new, free interaction with the world? Not as an attempt to obscure indifference with new meanings, but as a pure, unclouded presence in all that unfolds?
Do you think there’s a next step after getting stuck at the level of merely apprehending this dissolution? A step where, as one Zen master put it, an enlightened person “is most like an ordinary person who seeks nothing and just lives a simple life,” acting no longer from seeking or negation, but from this very “dissolution” having become the field for living manifestation? It seems to me that Nietzsche remained at the stage of refusing to move beyond this negation, but this stage cannot be a final point, as there can be no final point in that which is constantly dissolving. After all, we still have to pay the bills, be polite, and care for those weaker than us who depend on our “faith” in this hell on earth.
Thank you once again for such a profound and inspiring inquiry. I have read all your books and am a great admirer of your work from Russia.
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Thank you for your encouraging words about my work, Mike. I greatly appreciate it . . . I find everything you say after “However” to be spot on. I think those are all the right questions. And where you present a way forward, I find it right on. You ask, for example:
Is it possible that precisely within this complete acceptance of “meaninglessness and purposelessness” (which you call “an increase in intelligibility”) lies the space for a new, free interaction with the world? Not as an attempt to obscure indifference with new meanings, but as a pure, unclouded presence in all that unfolds?
In my view, such an open, new space is precisely the consequence of an analysis like mine. What one does within such a new space cannot be prescribed. That is my conviction anyway. I share Nietzsche’s wariness toward “the improvers of humankind.” I add to that wariness a commitment to Laruelle’s idea of the One. Every life is individual, a One different from other lives. How can we offer prescriptions for “what happens after we fully embrace this analytic collapse and release all inherited meanings and goals” without knowing the intimate details of a life? I certainly cannot. On the other hand, I believe that we can legitimately offer diagnoses of our World, which is to a significant extent shared. I know that such answers are disappointing. To many people, an answer like this also seems like an evasion, a cop out. Well, I could say with numerous minute details just how Irespond to the “fact of dissolution” and its consequent ruination of value and meaning. But I don’t believe that my response is the universalresponse. Nonetheless, as your comment suggests, a response is required. The interminable question, for me, is: What will it be?
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Glenn,
I fully embrace the idea of diagnoses because it aligns more closely with what we offer to the world—awareness, while refusing to prescribe. Your response is a stroke of luck for me. Thank you for your work!
Non-Buddhism 
What do you think?