I’m sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.
Fernando Pessoa — The Book of Disquiet
Unlike Pessoa I am not depressed — and everything, and the everythingness of everything, does not sicken me, quite the contrary, but perhaps this is because I am also deeply interested in nothingness and what it affords, which is freedom.
You see, the thing is, dear Bernardo, everythingness and nothingness go together, arise as one, dissolve into each other, are each other’s perfect complement, two notes that sing together, make each other laugh and cry and love.
in an email someone referred to an extraodinary experience i had in the top bunk of a night train to poland in 2016 which i told them about, but they had quite misunderstood it as a plain old ‘all is one’ type experience you might have with psychedelics 😅 and this was quite different.
part of my reply :
what happened on the train to poland was not an experience of unity or wholeness, quite the contrary. i experienced what i had previously thought of as ‘my consciousness’, becoming widely dispersed.
i’d had plenty of experiences — thanks to, amongst other things, sex and drugs and rock and roll, of containing multitudes, like walt whitman — but on the train to poland ‘i’ became distributed into multitudes. i did not become everything, it was, if anything, like everythingness entered me, and the ‘i’, which depends for its meanings and purposes on being at the centre of many things, not to say everything, in ceasing to be the centre, and thus no longer having any meanings or purposes, just evaporated.
somehow it seems important to stress this many-ness or multiplicity because it enabled me to see the intricate and complex web of connections, interactions and intra-actions of well … everythingness.
thank you for creating the possibility for me to think about this again and to more precisely describe it. it was one of, if not the most extraordinary experience/s of my life but it was in effect beyond language so it’s impossible to find adequate words for it — but i seem unable to stop trying.