art is magic. art that sells is market magic.

intuition here, but i thought you might like this and i am curious for your take on it @leahprime

fwiw here is a letter i wrote this afternoon to my advisor, the ‘german philosopher’. The working title of my thesis is Abundant Void: Meditations on Mindshift Hi Steven, First, my apologies for the delay in replying. I have been fighting a terrible cold for the last two weeks, which has kept me away from the keyboard and delayed my progress on Chapter Two. But your email has been sitting with me, particularly your point about the relation between theory and practice and the provocative trace that is left over. My Buddhist reading is that because a person is simply a clump of processes, there is no soul as a fixed entity. There is simply a continual ebbing and flowing of causes and conditions. In conventional reality, the trace is conceptual and impermanent. Yet, there is an enduring spirit in these relational clumps. When biological life ends, the meaning and connections created by that life remain, much like how the Buddha still lives in the relationships his life set in motion. These clumps, however, are just one class of phenomena. Through a close examination of dependent origination, we see that all phenomena resonate with human life and are mutually responsible for all phenomenal existence. In Buddhism, humans are only remarkable by degree, not in kind. Because of this, what might be called a soul, or a trace, is not uniquely human. It is the enduring relational pattern of any form coming into being. These clumps of processes can be most easily understood as nodes and nexus embedded within infinite network fabrics. They do not exist in isolation. They are localized points of relation, continuously interacting and drawing their form from the boundless web around them. I do have an honest, open question: what would Buddhist history be? What is the mark of time and existence? Explaining history away completely, as conditional conceptualization, is certainly unsettling. However, the deeper I go in my practice, and cross referencing my prior understanding of Einstein's relativity, I become more convinced that there is simply abundant void. And that the marks of history are an after-the-fact treatment of memory, a phenomenon acting on another phenomenon, not anything intrinsic to what actually happened. This brings up how emptiness has been fundamentally misunderstood. It is often seen as terrifying, but that fear is only a conditioned response. In my interpretation, informed heavily by Dōgen, emptiness can better be understood as abundant void. It is not a vacant absence, but the fertile, generative nexus from which all these relational patterns emerge. Put another way, it is the infinite chaotic soup before the first fractal emerges. You pointed out the incompleteness between theory and practice, and the provocative, murky trace left between them. My read of Dōgen is that this trace is exactly what he means by emptiness, and by the Stone Woman bearing children at night. He is not simply saying that practice is superior to theory. He is saying that through practice, we can actually see and inhabit the inherent contingency of life and phenomena. That realization is liberation itself, not just sitting on a cushion doing nothing.  He invites us to inhabit the space betwixt and between theory and practice, developing the capability to tolerate, embrace, and even love that ambiguity. The tension between theory and practice is only a tension if one needs concreteness or certainty. From Dōgen's perspective, this need for concreteness is just grasping at solidity in the face of ever-changing circumstances. And, to any Buddhist, that is an error. You asked for my view. I do not mean to say, stop learning, writing, imagining. I mean to say that these are all actually even more fecund when approached from a present moment. I asked something like it in my first reflection for you, a year ago: "What if we took Heidegger's call for meditative thinking seriously - not just as an abstract concept, but as a practice? (continued)