Year Twelve

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

Twelfth Year:  Emptiness

We shift from the soul as the reflector of particular emotions which must be negated or fulfilled again and again to the soul as the reflector of the universe only as we experience that each emotion cannot be negated or ever truly fulfilled; each emotion is bottomless.  Instead of I need to satisfy this emotion or I need to eradicate this emotion:  I need to fall into this emotion, into its nature, its complexity, its tentacles which reach out to the world.  When I have fallen to the bottom of that emotion, which is the same moment as when its tentacles have embraced the entire universe, I find that I no longer need to satisfy or eradicate the emotion, for I have become it and in becoming have no need to grasp or remove it externally.   Grasping and removing externally increase one’s dependency on using external means to deal with the continual reflection of the universe and the soul.  Falling into the mirror increases one’s practice in making one’s soul the mirror of the universe, the true function of the soul.  And the soul is uniquely human.  Animals can grasp and remove.  But only the human can refuse to grasp and remove and instead fall.  Only the human can fall to nothing to become everything.  All other sentient and insentient objects are only particular things¾destined to be confined to grasping and removing what they must grasp and remove¾but only humans can use their particularity to become mirrors of the universe.  The collective human project is to become a mirror of the universe, purely reflecting all that is.  Along the way, we reflect particular things, and this particular reflection is the function of technology and art.  The reflection of the universe is the function of God.  So mirrors function within mirrors.  Technology and art mirror each other, and technology/art mirror God.  The soul in its particularity produces technology and art.  The soul in its wholeness and depth produces God.  We are the only species that produce God and this is our ultimate task:  to create God.  Art and technology, in ways that we don’t fully comprehend, help us in this creation, even as we cannot fully comprehend how the specific and the general, the part and the whole, work together.  This mystery is life, for life binds the incomprehensible, and it is this mystery that can never be talked about or drawn or sung or danced, but only lived and pointed to.  But we digress.

The purpose of these Exercises is to create mirrors of the universe¾that is, artists¾and our above digression served two purposes in relation to this:  1) placed art in a broader perspective; 2) pointed to the practice of this year¾emptiness¾which is a falling and a nothingness.  This twelfth year is the practice of God.  While we have just argued that art and technology lead to God, or, from another perspective, art and technology are parallel tracks to the quest for God, each reflecting each other across the veil of flesh, these Exercises are ultimately not concerned with God, but with art.  We do not in these Exercises elevate the soul above other aspects of the person, but place the body, will, mind, soul and judgement as aspects which all need to be fully explored:  equally potent and necessary dimensions in the development of art and the creation of the artist’s creation.  In these Exercises, God is a necessary experience in the development of the artist, and the artist who has not experienced God is as stunted as the artist who has not experienced debauchery or business.

We have spoken of the experience of God elsewhere and do not wish to repeat what we have said with more focus and in more detail here.  Should the initiate require more guidance in the arts of emptiness, let her explore our adventures in Void and Reveries, or in a more metaphysical vein, To Delight in Fire.  Suffice it to say in this space that this year should be devoted to the nothingness at the root of all tentacles of the soul.

Even as we have lost various initiates in progress, whether through the pleasures of the body or through ascetic delights, through business or war, science, philosophy, non-mind or music, so we will lose some initiates in the joys of emptiness.  Let them be lost; they will have found their place and if these Exercises have assisted some in finding their home, some good will have been done, though it be secondary to our purpose here.

We need to make brief mention here of some confusion the reader may experience in conflating the sixth, ninth and twelfth years:  the experience of no-will, no-mind and the emptiness of the soul.  It is true that the three experiences have similarities that, say, war and compassion don’t.  Nevertheless, the perceptive reader will have noted similarities between numerous other years:  war and physical positive excess; war and business¾to name but two.  The similarities in this case arise from the sense of falling and deprivation which have been innate to the closing year of the second, third and fourth phases:  no-will, no-mind and emptiness.  Each year, however, should reveal a new dimension of the world to the initiate, for not only does it come after certain, frequently intense, experiences that the initiate needs to simultaneously reflect on, absorb and purge herself of, but each experience of negation is different in itself, for two reasons.

Firstly, each experience of negation occurs at a different point on the initiate’s spiral into the centre of art.  If you picture each phase of these Exercises as a ring on a spiral, so that there are five rings, all end years of each phase are aligned with each other.  Each reminds of the other, but occurs expanding and subsuming the previous experiences of negation.

Secondly, the initiate must walk along a different path to nothingness for each negation.  To empty the will, to empty the mind, and to empty the soul are all acts of falling, but one falls down a different well in each case, even though the bottom of each well is joined by the same nameless subterranean water.  So in the will, one removes oneself from action and contemplates the root of the actions one desires; in the mind, one removes oneself from thought and contemplates the root of the constructs the mind desires to erect; in the soul, one falls into desire and in the falling becomes it.

Each path to nothingness is a dismantling of structure:  no-will dismantles the will to build structures in the world; no-mind dismantles the desire to build conceptual structures; emptiness dismantles the desire for structures in the heart.  No structure in the world, no structure in the mind, no structure in the heart:  these are the paths to emptiness.  Each is progressively more difficult than the previous, but each is necessary to proceed to the subsequent.  In the end, there is freedom, for all is play, although this end play is play that is intimate with grief.

In each path of negation, the initiate falls¾falls not to fall, but to become what one falls into.  For in striving, whether this striving be of the will, mind or soul, one never becomes what one strives for, but in the striving may, in part, externalize the striving and so demonstrate to the world what the striving looks like.  But the striver is always separate from his striving.  In falling, the faller does not attempt in any way to externalize the desire, but neither does she attempt to negate it; rather she falls into the desire while not moving the desire into the world and in not moving, she falls into spaces where no one can see but are as real as real.  So striving is two and dual, and falling is one and unity.  But the initiate should know that two is not greater than one nor one than two; both of these errors are errors of those who wish to narrow the world to their tendencies.  Two and one are mirrors of each other; should one fail, both shall fail.  At the root of two and one are zero, but of number and shape we have spoken elsewhere.

So this year the initiate should fall into each tentacle of the soul and become it until she burns, until she burns with the fire at the soul’s dark watery root.