Zero State
Maintaining malleable orbits of perspective to reconcile our place and purpose [with]in a chaotic reality
“We don’t live life in general; we live life in particular ways, and it is in its particulars that life is invested with wisdom and meaning.”
Henry Shukman
No guarantees
Nature isn’t really kind to us.
While affording us an existence which we should be eternally grateful for, and while sustaining us beyond anything we can ask for, the natural world is pretty keen on humbling us at any given chance.
The human animal simply seems to want things that aren’t exactly possible in the chaotic wilderness of reality— permanence, stability, security.
And while we may have achieved some prosperous stretches or patches of relative comfort, that doesn’t mean that reality is in any way catering to our needs.
In fact, a fulsome life demands a worthy level of suffering — the kind that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would claim are necessary for a meaningful existence.
An authentic and meaningful existence is one that reflects the truth of our reality, not one that skews nature out of self-preservation or self-satisfaction.
We’re not guaranteed anything, and the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of our resolute acceptance of this fact is, of all things, our own perspective.
Satellites of consciousness
We orbit. We orbit ideas, people, movements, events.
Our orbits, like anything, can intensify or degrade, depending on how we receive information — we’re satellites of perception, constantly processing the data around us as we sense our way through reality.
It’s our consciousness that drives these orbits, deriving meaning from our circumnavigation through space and time as we process the world through our circuits of experience.
The more we move, and the more dynamically we shift our perspectives, the more effectively we can manage our orbits (navigate); if we remain rigid, giving no regard for the peripheries of our perceptive capacity, we begin to lose touch with the essential nature of reality — we stunt our navigative potential.
In the worst case, our conscious perspective can be likened a needle that drags along a deepening vinyl groove, one within which we can find ourselves becoming calcified in if we don’t exercise enough maneuverability between states of perception.
In a more ideal case, our consciousness can be likened to evolutionary genetics, flowing and changing, pulsating with (and continuously learning from) the causal tides of life.
Our ability to switch orbits — to jump grooves and to adapt to change via the stretching of perspective — is not only beneficial towards our effective navigation through space and time, but flat out necessary to keep up with the world around us.
It’s no different from a neurological context; if we’re engaged with the same agonists and accustomed to the same neurochemical deployments day after day — receiving our serotonin and dopamine fixes through the same channels at the same times in the same ways — our minds stagnate.
The same is true on all spectrums — psychology, economics, particle physics, cultural constructs, architecture or biology.
Stagnation precedes dissolution; adaptability precedes evolution.
What’s needed, then, is an understanding of how to maintain perceptual malleability.
Sojourns in Zero States
We’re a sentient organism caught in an exploding spiral of cosmic chaos, a collision of particles that affords us, for some rhyme or reason, the ability to momentarily sense reality and experience a subjective journey through it.
If we become too fixed in our orbits, whether it’s a perspective or a practice, we lose our originality and malleability — we lose touch with the reality of reality.
A solution begins to emerge by contrast, a form of functioning alongside the causal happenstance of reality — dynamism, nimbleness, and a reluctance to corrode into a shadow of an existence.
The only point from which this can be achieved, or genuinely felt, is from a state that’s practiced in physics and religion alike — a vacuum or a void, a leap of faith or blank slate.
A zero state, one in which a kind of reset (or recalibration) can be attained. One of being and observing, not of doing and grasping.
To exit an orbit, or to detach from its pull, a cycle (whether thought or action) must be broken; because perspective, quick to root itself, should remain unfixed and perceptually nomadic, like a tumbleweed.
To avoid the intrinsic pulls of the human animal, those that over-personify the natural order or try to over-compartmentalize it, the journey of consciousness can’t stray too far from the true wilderness of existence.
And to keep perspective safeguarded against the dragging masses of unrealistic expectation, like existential black holes, in such a way that allows for a heightened conscious navigation of the natural world, along with a healthy digestion of all of it’s information, is to keep afloat in authenticity.
Such an ascended and authentic perspective is about seeing the orbital trajectories and employing prescience when and where possible, amidst increasingly understood (and consequently anticipated) cycles, those of our environment or of ourselves — external and internal.
The zero state strips away the context and baggage, only for a moment — hopefully enough of a moment to appreciate the true meaning or value or gravity of a situation that unfolds causally through time and space.
It assures the formation of a genuine and aware perception — a recalibrated perspective — even if only for a fleeting moment before falling back into orbit.
