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[rejectheaven]

cultural bingbong theory: a manifesto

by marcus leung

I am a white male. There exist no societal pressures that force me to consider my short-term safety, and as such I have the luxury of thinking abstractly. I am also a diagnosed schizophrenic (schizoaffective, but language is more a vehicle for communication than veracity). Here are three important things to consider before we start: 1. Everything has meaning. This is axiomatic, as in any set with objects that may or may not have meaning, the first meaningless object in the sequence would be "The First Meaningless Object In The Sequence", granting it relative meaning. It follows then that all things must be meaningful. 2. Man is a nothingless ape. He eternally clutches his expensive watch, trapped on a desert island -- the one place where both time and money are meaningless. Wait never mind everything has meaning. 3. Here's a joke: that same man sits down to write his life story, and never stops. When he runs out of paper, he uses his house. When he runs out of house, he uses the earth. When he runs out of earth, he uses the sky. When he runs out of sky he realizes he should have gotten a tattoo. That's why I don't have any tattoos yet, aside from the pale blue dot my friend left in my arm when he stabbed me with a pen.

I. FIRSTNESS

I haven't told you the beginning yet, but I will. It all started when nous (intellect) met Ananke (necessity). This harmony-cum-dissonance (hehe cum) is the whorl in which we all live, laugh, love, and buy the associated decorative merchandise. We weep and wonder and wend toward henosis, harming indiscriminately, confused as to why our loved ones are dying and not texting us back. How do we escape our shape? Hint: pull not others into the pit between you and the world, and be not the pit itself. It all started when God chose to contract His Ohr Ein Sof. This was not out of necessity, despite it being necessary. Had God not restricted His own infinite light, there would be no emptiness (ayin) to hold us. Once we understand that nothingness came second, we can start to trust in what came first. How do we feel once again the glow and the gleam on our spirits' skin ("Oh, it feels so good! Sun rays" - Tanemon, Digimon World)? Hint: treat impurity as an obscurantist, shading us from that real shit. More on this later. Just kidding, this is the end of the essay. It all started when it never started. The Buddha was once asked if the objects of our contemplation were separate from the contemplating mind. He replied that they were the same, as all was vijñapti-mātra (somewhere between "mind-only" and "representation-only"). "... Why? Because however I imagine things, that is how they appear." - Pratyutpanna Samādhi Sūtra How do we demarcate real from fake? Hint: the name is not the shape, the same way map is not territory. ("No matter how many names you learn, no matter what sequence you arrange them in, they will tell you nothing about the source or the end." - A. A. Attanasio)

II. THE WOUND IN THE WORLD AND HOW WE CAN KNOW IT

Time is only here to stop everything from crashing into each other. If we look at the present as a bardo state between past and future, where action meets will, we can begin to deconstruct our self-stultifying behaviours. So says this bard-o, at least. Here's another joke: a man (sorry these are all about men) buys a beautiful antique grandfather clock and for some reason decides to carry it home. Maybe he lives close by. He probably chose his house based on its proximity to the antique store. He's walking with this unwieldy thing and his gait is all goofy because the clock is so heavy. He's so distracted that he doesn't even notice another guy on his phone making a beeline towards him! The two bump into each other and the clock is dropped and shatters into a million pieces. Furious, the man yells "Why don't you watch where you're going?!" The other man, equally furious, shouts back "Why don't you just wear a watch like everyone else?!" This is a very funny and important joke if you are me. I'll be a little more concrete, and unconscionably political. The Mayans were correct: the world ended in 2012. We elected the same person we always elect, only this time he was Black. Obama's second term served more as emblem than force; we projected our continuously evolving set of morals onto him, went about our beastly business, and performed four years of autofellatio while the world and its once-worthy ways eroded before our very eyes. It, like much before and after, was one long slow-clap for the self. "History is over," we said, "and we're finally the good guys." If I had to describe 2012 in two words, I would be an asshole and use latin: terminus est. "This is the line of division." What changed in 2012 to make it so salient? Nothing. The answer is nothing. Our Sword of Damocles dangled just a horse-hair away, and we pretended not to see it. Plus, we were kings! Nothing bad ever happens to kings. "catch ya boi with the lascivious oeillade 2k12 and beyond" - James Arc, polyphasic duelist Gangnam Style was our omphalion, Grumpy Cat our trusty steed, and Carly Rae Jepsen gave us tentative permission to call her. The future looked bright, and those Ye-style shutter shades allowed us to peer directly into it. What peered back was then-unrecognizable, but we know now, don't we? I wanted to use a period there instead of a question mark to denote a rhetorical lack of inflection at the end, but it didn't look right.

III. DON'T GO FASTER, JUST GO MORE QUICKLY

Are you familiar with Bodhidharma? Maybe you've seen him on TikTok or something. He loved staring at walls for years on end, and he did it so much that his arms and legs fell off. Bodhidharma (probably named after Dharma from Dharma & Greg) loved walls not because of what they represented, but because they were free of representation. With the absence of both self and other, he was free to ponder the true nature of reality. What did he learn? Follow him at @bodhidharma to find out. This is a bit tricky to explain, but sometimes the things that we think are stupid are actually just fucking reality. The corollary to this is that sometimes what we think is just fucking reality is actually stupid. Look at the sentence "More people have been to Berlin than I have." It doesn't mean anything, but your brain tricks you into thinking it does. Imagine if the world was like that, where your brain tricked you into things without your conscious consent? Then imagine if everyone else's brain was also tricking you through the power of civilization and the behaviours it engenders? Haha. I like to look at this as one big dream. Billions of tiny dreamers, all dreaming in unison. Sometimes one dreamer's dream can be so powerful that it disrupts our agreed-upon reality. Those people are either clairvoyants or schizophrenics. Make sure you know which is which, or you might find yourself in trouble you can't get out of one day! "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg." - Samuel Butler This feels like a good spot to start talking about what I call cultural accretion. The sheer volume of culture being produced presently is orders of magnitude grander than the totality of human experience beforehand. A big claim, I know, but it sounds pretty cool doesn't it? The landscape is accelerating beyond our wildest imaginations, and most of it is wasteland. I attribute much of this spreading rot to anomie, or normlessness. The fragmentation and clustering of modern discourse is our strange ally in this war against decay. Small subcultures popping up over shared interests in certain media has brought us back to our roots of 100-strong social circles. Aristotle (pronounced like Chipotle I think) argued that ethnic and cultural diversity undermine democracy, as disparate groups had disparate goals and needs. He was kind of dumb but it's okay, he didn't really understand the concept of a post-scarcity society the way we do. We do understand it, right? Is anyone there? If we can find and forge harmony in small communities, maybe those small communities could eventually harmonize with each other. Dismantling hierarchies goes much deeper than a lot of us like to think about. It involves defying some of our more basal and perfunctory human wants, but thankfully not our needs. Don't worry, need and want are probably opposites, as you can't truly want something if you need it for survival. Good thing we've evolved beyond most of that shit! Do you know the expression "blood is thicker than water"? A very clever Rabbi thinks that it's truncated from "blood shed in battle is thicker than the water of the womb", meaning that bonds forged through shared experience mean more than filial ties. Wouldn't it be funny if it meant the exact opposite of what people think it means? Wouldn't it be even funnier if everything was like that?

IV. REJECT HEAVEN UNTIL ALL HELLS ARE EMPTIED

If I were someone I would call myself a Ksitigarbhist. Everyone is up on Avalokitesvara's one thousand dicks, but Ksitigarbha (Jizō-sama if you're a weeb [or literally "EARTH MATRIX" if you're fucking sicky]) is holding himself back from enlightenment and his resultant Pure Land ascension until hell stops being hell. Remember in Mario Bros 3 when you get the Tanooki Suit (I know the animals are called tanuki but the suit is spelled with two o's, like the word goodbye) and you turn into that statue and bop enemies on the head? That statue is of Ksitigarbha. You're probably wondering why. I'm wondering why too. That's honestly why I wrote this essay. Ksitigarbha was once a maiden, if you can believe it. That maiden's name was Sacred Girl, and she was so sad about her mom's death that she prayed every day to spare her mom from hell-world. Eventually the Buddha let her visit her mother (katabasis appears in almost every world religion, I wonder why???), and it turned out that through filial piety and a bit of luck, the mother had ascended to heaven. While Sacred Girl was happy I guess, she was really shook by everyone else's suffering down there. This spurred her to spend the rest of her reincarnations helping others ascend too. When she was eventually reborn as a man named Jijang, he found a nice mountain to reach enlightenment on, and just posted up. The body of Jijang is still preserved to this day, check it out if you ever find yourself near Mt. Jiuhua. "The opposite of fact is falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." - Niels Bohr Ksitigarbha carries a staff that he uses to pry open the gates of hell. All he wants to do is save all sentient beings. What's stopping you from wanting the same except your ego? Maybe if you stopped talking so much shit about people you'd have a cool staff too. Maybe you even have a staff nestled deep inside you already. Don't wield it wantonly!

Buddhists have this thing called tathātā. It describes the suchness of things. Suchness is a very difficult concept, especially in a post-content world. Things are rapidly losing their suchness and becoming vehicles for content. This is a tricky thing to reverse! But let's say we could, and that the overwhelming totality of suchness starts tingling in your thousand-petaled self, what should you do? When confronted with pure suchness, you have two options: A) taint it by using language B) don't I recommend B.

V. WHAT ALWAYS WAS YET SELDOM IS I spent so long talking about Buddhists and their words for things that I barely touched on the unknowable infinite that is Ein Sof. We tend to look at things through the false dichotomy of materialism vs creationism, but there's a cheeky way to look beyond that. What if all things flow from an underlying and absolute principle or reality? What if each stage of emanation was further removed from said absolute, until all that remained were mere trappings of divinity? Don't worry, it's probably not like that. When you first look into Kabbalah you might be confused as to why there are only ten sephirot yet eleven emanations. Seems like a silly mistake, right? Keter, the sephira above all others, is the superconscious intermediary between us and God, and is not exactly a sephira in the way that the other ten are. Keter is called the crown, and the crown sits above the head. The crown is also the term used for the sahasrara, the uppermost chakra, that thousand-petaled lotus I slyly referenced earlier. Haha maybe they're connected! "Do not think... Do not speak... Do not hope... Do not... ..." - Pure Vessel, Hollow Knight Keter is the most hidden of all hidden things. If you look hard enough, you'll never find it. It's sometimes referred to as "the air that cannot be grasped", as opposed to regular air which is super graspable. Keter is the most exciting sephira to talk about because it's completely incomprehensible to humans and I love wasting everyone's time. Have you ever heard of Hebrew gematria? It assigns a number value to words based on alphanumeric ciphers. Each word is its own equation, and the sum denotes the numerical value of the word. This is great if you love words, and probably great if you love numbers, I don't know, I hate them. This allows for what are essentially numerical homographs, where many different words and phrases can have the same numerical value as many others. The name of the archangel Metatron, for example, has a value of 406. So too does the phrase "cannabis addiction". Haha maybe they're connected too!

VI. THIS IS A WINDOW, THIS IS AN ANIMAL

Diogenes was once asked what the difference was between life and death. "No difference," he replied. He was then asked why, if that were the case, he chose to remain in this life. "Because there is no difference." I think death is probably like living, only a little less. Don't let yourself die though, that's the most important thing. Think of how sad everyone would be if you were gone! Plus you've already gone through so much trauma, do you really want to be reborn without having worked through it? The hard part is already over, I promise. "This match won't light! How strange, it lit before." - a joke book from my childhood Trusting yourself to trust yourself can be very difficult, especially if you're wrangling with realities too tough to tame at the moment. If you're really having trouble, try bringing a friend a sandwich, or winking at the moon. If none of this works for you, you might have to get your hands a bit dirty. Sometimes you need to grab the bull by the horns and the rose by the thorns and the-- Also here's a playlist that might help with things. Ten songs of nothingness, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VyAUtjwGVOVr6Zsh1Iwhl?fbclid=IwAR38mZrqjxiqSnl0zOCuDQ-Xmeq6G5fSeaQQEDnulrdktJuYaT_0xfV_XwM

Hey, it's okay! It's just light!

- Marcus marcus@rejectheaven.com