Year Nine

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Mind and Mirror the Mind of the World

Ninth Year:  Non-Mind

Mind, in its great two-ness, forces itself to ever-increasing modes of duality, spiraled, vigorous, weary, driving itself to destruction.  Driven to the new, in the end it finds everything old and desires death as the only creation left it.  In this cycle is the mind’s fulfillment and negation; this year in the final phase, mind completes this cycle.

The mind creates in its salacious urge for newness and as its energy diffuses sees its creation from a distance and is repulsed, for the stories it told itself, propelling itself forward, externalizing itself, are lies and all that is true are the stories based on those lies, and as the mind knows this in its geriatric horror it stumbles and breaks a hip and wobbles, drinking, to the grave.

But should it see not simply this, but the energy comprising truth and lies, the rise and fall, pride and shame, that the mind is energy in all its forms, while still subject to changing fortunes, climates, it may also know itself in ways not known before.  Such is this year’s aim.

Every construct raises its opposite.  Each creation dies upon conception.  When mind¾as will¾is taken to its end it cancels itself while still existing.  This cancellation and simultaneous existence is the experience of this ninth year.

So the initiate should not cease raising, but for every raising, also raze.  She should do this without tiring until every edifice is known and destroyed.  During this process, she should not simply construct and deconstruct, but also¾most importantly¾become the process of the mind itself.  In doing so, the construction and deconstruction become not edifices or rubble, although both, but less these than manifestations of the same inexplicable reality we call non-mind, but in being not, more mind than mind.

This energy, this Shiva-circle, is a whirling, fire, water, air, a beginning, end, and all between, the origin of origins, the death of death, the mind in motion even when at rest.

So the initiate, having known the great creations of the mind in the first two years of this phase, knows this final year the great destruction, so to know anew creation, so she can create from the creation below creation, the creation that destroys itself.  Only here, in elemental space, can despair not disappear but ride, proud and skeletal, on the steed circling on the carnal carousel, from which we now do not attempt escape but rather laugh to its endless music and motion.

Some readers will have heard of those who advocate a clearing of the mind, a kind of mental sweeping of all thought debris.  But we view this advocacy as sterile and ineffective; one does not clear the mind unless one desires to be a zombie, a limping rag, a citizen.  One rather accelerates the mind to fill itself with itself and in this filling increases the pressure within the small cranial container of that sarcous skull until it bursts and pyrogenically is itself and moves beyond.  In such a state, the initiate is ready to migrate to the soul.