Mindlessness Is Next to God-be-ness

or How to Lose Your Mind and Find Ourself

We are the space within the bubble, the water in the drop

Is it okay to talk about this yet? When have our minds ever helped us? The royal “us”, as in all of us.

If my soul says “I am…”, echoing my spirit, which itself echoes what is, then my mind inserts and fills in a blank: “I am —·—·—”.

I am willing. I am able. I am intent. I am grieving.

I am. Yes, that is clear. We are. It’s what a sneeze teaches us, or is made of, or what a blink would say. The rest is mental.

Even the Thrice-Great Hermes may have had it twisted. Mind is all, the first principle goes. What does a mind swim in?

Our Sufi minstrel Rumi once encapsulated us: “You are not a drop of the ocean. You are the whole ocean in a drop.”

And recently I encountered a magnificent effulgence of foam. Interpenetrating scales of bubbles layered in their complexities among many non-discrete dimensions. We live our lives often as bubbles, in bubbles, bouncing and joining and eventually popping.

After a distinctly spiritual bubble bath, I began formulating this slippery spooge of an analogy: We are not bubbles in the foam. Nor are we the foam, the assemblage of bubbles. We are space for foam.

No one knows how to be

The only comfort I can find in a world of constant change is this deep, profound ignorance that precedes and follows my mind. Before I know, I don’t. And once I think I know, there is more I don’t know than I ever did.

Can this bring us solace? Only if we can detach or disidentify from the claw machine that grasps for success, for knowing. If we can be at once the knowing, the knower, and the known, but none of the trinity alone, then we are at peace in the wholeness of what is, bobbing in the bottomless well of being from which emanates the foam in silent stillness.

Some Foamy Resources

More practically, I very much enjoy José F. Mata’s Quarantine Care Package, which highlights practices that:

  • Center with kind touch
  • Stretch within your bubble
  • Hone your point of awareness
  • Do your abilities
    • play/dance/sing
    • eat/s(h)it/die
    • think/see/know
    • understand/listen/feel
  • Give what you have; ask for what you need.

Foam well, yall.

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