THE END OF THE UNIVERSE, PART XI

Kailas. The answer. The universe within the universe. Tsering Woeser's pilgrimage. And the professional.

TEACHING/THE DETOUR/SECRET READING CUES

How to create a time hole in which to see what you would have needed and wanted before being taught less than something by those you sought out thinking they knew all?

Again and again, approaching the official or professional Other produces disappointment, unless we approach them from the point of view of emptiness. This emptiness emptiness emptiness is what we know forever in gut and intuition but are taught to never allow or say.

This emptiness is what Simone Weil calls the treasure in the universe, where you must hide, and no heresy can ever be caused by its assertion or unknowing.

School as professional school gets in the way because it does not say emptiness emptiness emptiness none too early. The teacher or professional appears and an irritation-emptiness sets in because inwardly we have literally cognized all this forever as nothing but emptiness.

The ‘precog’ who would refuse teaching and say they have known puts themselves in the position of the pass, this word that is taken from Lacan that indicates the dissolution of the desire both for teaching and experience itself.

THE SCHOOL OF THE PASS

Let’s merely note two more reading cues, this time from Lacan’s ‘Allocution’ in 1970:

Perhaps it will not appear excessive to postulate that knowledge is something more widespread in the world than teaching can imagine?

And also:

Is it not to recut the thing off from what makes teaching the obstacle of what she would know of what she says?

THE CROSSING

The pass is the Tögal. And the Tögal is the pass. The Tögal is the ‘direct crossing’, ‘the direct approach’ or ‘leapover’, which is intended to bring very quickly the realization of Enlightenment in a lifetime, and thus none too early.

Which school are we in? The school of the Tögal only, since this is the school of more than radical emptiness. This is also the school of the pass.

Here is a reading cue from some secret writing of mine (since we are writing under the direct pressure of dissolution (which may also be no pressure at all in absolute untying), the secret may be expedited):

I assume and take form as the One-Leap Teaching in a lifetime, the Tögal, given that our lifetimes may now in general be limited. Being such in radiance, I assume the general form of a ‘who knows’ and everything it contains in a self-secret way about the universes and the multiverses. Held in the singularity in the same way I am held in the palm of the Perfect Teaching of No Name, I take the brain-mind complex to be the habitual form and not the heart-essence, the historical occasion and not the radiance. I assume this well-timed meditation on the Singularity as a reflection of world developments which are always there, and yet more and more technologically there. I assume the gift wave of this great great great teaching as a kiss on the forehead. I take this great great great blessing as the chance to exhaust and see-through the data-nature of all desire in one lifetime, as this experience has been doubled by present conditions where lifetimes are themselves, at least according to conventional thinking, threatened more than ever by impermanence.

What does this mean here that I go ahead to recognize the double finitude as a kiss on my forehead? If the experience of impermanence is doubled, Tögal perhaps changes in nature. It approaches abbreviation in and as the end, the end which, as we have seen, may not be the end and so is held in just this double tension and assurance of emptiness.

CAN ONE HIDE? DOES THIS MAKE SENSE?

Nietzsche writes:

The desert grows: woe to him who hides deserts!

He also writes of songs ‘composed among daughters of the desert’, of being far from Europe. What does ‘woe to him who hides deserts’ mean? It recalls everything we said in Part VI about devastation and staying with devastation. It also recalls something in devastation in particular that has to be tarried with. We have connected this to pain and to the pain of the heart. What Nietzsche is saying is ‘do not hide deserts of pain’.

We said that as shifters from world to universe, or pain to devastation, or destruction to devastation to a second sense of destruction, there was suddenly pain that could not be resolved.

Doesn’t Heidegger say this in The History of Beyng?

The devastation itself remains immune to everything that disowns it and that has seen through its corrupted essence; for it cannot, indeed, be eliminated directly, but only set into its essential end through its very essence.

Since there is a vibe shift, there is this pain that comes suddenly, none too soon. Since we are universal shifters and anticipate things in the bottleneck of intelligences, the pain of the heart insists. It insists and we don’t know what it is yet. We still don’t know how pain and technology liaise.

Heidegger is saying that we can’t move beyond the devastation and that also whenever we try to do so, the devastation throws it off. It throws off our efforting and lies and even our seeing-through.

Let’s leave the reading cue here and maybe there will be time to come back:

devastation itself remains immune to everything that disowns it and that has seen through its corrupted essence

When Heidegger says ‘woe to him who hides deserts’, there is an ambiguity in the verb ‘to hide’ (bergen). One senses the same in the Weil passage when she speaks of what happens ‘if you hide the universe within the universe’. Hiding the universe within the universe: the clarity of meaning is diverse and rich. The meaning of Weil’s sentence is nourishing. It’s not clear what she means so clearly—or more accurately, we know full well what she means but are also waiting to calm down into it. Perhaps we should not hide from what is totally hidden there.

DEVASTATION DESERT STORM

What is hiding here? If all time and space ran out tomorrow and the universe ended for real, would it still be best to hide the universe within the universe? Perhaps so. There is nothing more infinite than reticence, and even on the last night on earth (a phantasm) we might crave quiet more than anything else.

As for the desert and devastation, they are connected. In Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks Donatella Di Cesare suggests that ‘desertification’ is a better translation of Verwüstung than ‘devastation’. Di Cesare gives a commentary on hiding:

The warning [about not hiding deserts] leaves open an ambiguity because of the verb bergen, which can mean to find, to give refuge, to hide oneself, or to hide something. For Nietzsche, the growth of the desert was not a merely geographic phenomenon. The devastation of terrain was not only the desertification of the earth.

The desertion of Being, which is desolation, always means the desert, and it is this desertification (Verwüstung) that we have to not hide and must stay with. There where desert means the undermining of the possibility of an inceptive decision, we stay there and await. Hence we have:

Verwüstung—desertification
Verödung—desolation

The echo and the evocation of the word Wüste is there right in front of us, devastation already saying ‘desert’, like a desert storm wound we can’t and won’t forget. An ‘invisible killer’:

KAILAS/THE PILGRAMAGE

Just this week I saw the most beautiful thing. On Instagram I watched the Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser make the ancient pilgrimage to Mount Kailash (Kailas) in what is known as the oldest kingdom of Tibet, Zhangzhung. There were posts and videos by Woeser over a number of days, and what at first was not apparent was made clear: she was travelling to see the sacred mountain.

According to my Lama the district of Kailas is where the teaching of emptiness emptiness emptiness originated 17,000 years ago. We are told through the Lineage that the emptiness teaching has itself survived 13 world systems, or zhing khrams, that is, 13 universes. (By this count, we are in the 14th universe.)

Instagram allows us to see Woeser’s journey moment by moment. Suddenly, we are in ancient Tibet—the land of emptiness emptiness emptiness. Suddenly the ancient pilgrimage is present and possible.

Tsering Woeser, Instagram, 16 September 2021, Tibet, Kailas.

ON HAVING TO END WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THE NUMBER OF EXTINCTION IS

Still, of course, there is absolutely no security. This is what emptiness emptiness emptiness is at first and ongoingly, the devastation and its subtlety, the ambiguousness of devastation that only has a chance of being dissolved in good time in emptiness emptiness emptiness, and nowhere else. Is this what the Tögal means in terms of a doubled finitude?

Just as there is heaven other than heaven, there is also end other than end. Tögal perhaps means having to end without knowing what the number of extinction is. Since all is known in advance as emptiness, and the answer to the Drake Equation must already exist even if it is not know (written down), then all of this is known in advance and dissolved in emptiness.

The answer to the Drake Equation can be seen in advance because when it is seen in detail it will be seen only in emptiness emptiness emptiness. But this means it is dissolved. Even in seeing it, we see it only in emptiness. Even in knowing the number of extinction what we really know is emptiness emptiness emptiness emptiness emptiness emptiness.

Does this mean that we already have the answer to the Drake Equation and it is dissolution into emptiness, either literally or figuratively, or that we must always end without it since emptiness emptiness emptiness is primary? To hide the universe within the universe must we hide the meaning of this and for how many lifetimes?

THE NAMES OF THE MOUNTAIN

The Tibetan name for Kalias is Gang Rinpoche (Tibetan: གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ་; simplified Chinese: 冈仁波齐峰). Wikipedia says:

Gang or Kang is the Tibetan word for snow peak analogous to alp or hima; rinpoche is an honorific meaning ‘precious one’ so the combined term can be translated ‘precious jewel of snows’.

Rinpoche is the term I use for my own Dzogchen teacher, with the n and not the m spelling, which is as far as I understand it the more traditional spelling.

gang / kang / alp / hima

Some of the other names are as follows:

Kangri Rinpoche (‘Precious Snow Mountain’)
Water’s Flower
Mountain of Sea Water
Nine Stacked Swastika Mountain

For Buddhists, Kailas is known as the navel of the universe, and for adherents of Bön, the abode of the sky goddess Sipaimen. We know that these Tibetan mountains are more than any others ‘water towers’ crucial to China. Between the desert and its devastation and the water towers of the Tibetan global mountain range, out of which being collapses as water and drainage and rivers, everything is at stake. The pilgrimage Woeser makes is caught in this ongoing melt-event. Here are four videos shot by her where you can see Precious Jewel of Snows from different angles.

THE EXPERT

We started by referring to the disappointment of and in the professional and expert Other, going to them and finding nothing. I have experience this as more than ever the case. There is nobody who has not fallen off from the point of view of remembering emptiness. There is nobody not almost completely lost to what intelligence can now do.

The spread of the fake expert, the ‘fact-checker’, the self-appointed guardian of world health, is something very real, and no less a shock in the school of the single leap. Geert Vanden Bossche even says we should completely ignore them:

People, no matter their names and reputation, who are not knowledgeable in the fields of immunology, virology, vaccinology and evolutionary biology/ epidemiology are, therefore, not a good source for information or advice.