the end of seeking

postmortem of a restlessness

Yesterday, there was a juncture that felt like the end of seeking.

This is a postmortem or a signpost that tries to convey how that end came to be. This writing isn’t meant to convey any metaphysical claim, but to write it in any other way is to not tell the truth that comes from my own context—because no-thing exists without context. More on that later.

Note on 04/21: there is an addendum to this post, which explains subtler stuff.

background understanding

There are three points to understand or to see through:

The first is that everything is already perfect.

The second is that everything is self-liberating.

The third is that everything is situated, or that contextuality is reality.

everything is already perfect

Perfection, commonly understood, mean that all things are good, painless, or blissful. And because they are perfectly good, painless, or blissful, therefore we do not need to take actions to make them better.

However, that understanding misses what “perfection” points toward here. Then what? We are talking about the structural, which describes how things already are.

That is: a realization in which whatever appears right now, including thoughts and abstractions, sensory impressions, tensions, mathematical objects, intuition, bodily pain, joy, faith, meaning, confusion, love, etc., is already complete in being exactly how they are. This includes the discrete and the diffuse, the structured and the nebulous, the patterned and the chaotic, the Archetypal and the shallow.

Because we say “whatever appears right now”, we can call them “appearances” which are—again, for emphasis—any arising that appears, any texture of experience, any mode of world showing itself. Even what seems formless, or hard to pin down, or contradictory, or vague, or divine. It all counts. It all qualifies. Subtlety, strangeness, abstraction, partiality, and unresolvedness are all included.

And all appearances are already complete in being exactly how they are.

So it’s not goodness. It means not in deficit. No-thing needs to be added or taken away for an appearance to be what it already is, and doesn’t need to become something else to count as real or valid. The sounds, the sensations, the confused thought spirals, the clarity, the tension, the mess, the awe—it’s all showing up as itself, and there’s nothing wrong with that arising of appearances.

“Everything is already perfect” is the end of the premise that things need to be otherwise before they can be.

everything is self-liberating

Let’s do a neti neti: “everything is self-liberating” is not the same as things resolving themselves without human actions.

Instead, it is about the non-stickiness of appearances, of phenomena. Appearances, displays—they self-release. They self-release because that is exactly their nature: they arise, display/appear, and dissolve, without needing to be pushed or pulled. As directly experienced, they do not stick. They don’t freeze into essence. They’re like writing on water, like mist in sunlight, like déjà vu. Vivid, intimate, undeniable, gone.

The mind makes it seem otherwise by trying to hold, grasp, extend, define, reject, accept, enlarge, or enlighten. Which is not a mistake, because that also is part of appearances doing what they do. Even clinging self-liberates.

More subtly, “self-liberating” does not lead to irrelevancy of emotions (being detached) or irrelevancy of the world (depression), but in which things do not become true by being clung to, and they do not disappear by being ignored.

Again: things do not become true by being clung and stuck to, and things do not disappear by being ignored. Appearances arise, and appearances go away.

They do what they do, and then they’re gone. To see this directly, do notice the absence of remainder in every appearance. See how they appear in the mind, and then how they disappear. See that there is nothing left if not clung to.

Even now: this thought, this breath, this moment, this reading is already halfway gone.

To come at it from a different angle: there is no two object that is the same. There is no two perception that is the same. There is no instant-of-instant (of qualia) that is the same. Every arising is sui generis, because there are innumerable frames that make that arising to be a new arising.

For example, the thought and accompanying emotion of “I’m really, really tired” at 10 AM on a Monday while being hungry is not the same as “I’m really, really tired” at 1 AM on a Saturday after a night of partying with friends. Obviously, right?

So the pattern of words and the sublingual experience recurs, but the substrate, context, and affective tone are all novel. Thus the arising itself is new. Thus all appearances are new.

The same thought never recurs. The same feeling never repeats. The idea of recurrence is itself a heuristic, a useful fiction riding on pattern recognition and memory reconstruction. But any arising? One-off and irrreproducible.

Ehi passiko—see for yourself, test for yourself.

Try a careful attention on awareness. A breath is never in the same place or experienced the same, a tone in speaking never with the same inflection, a concept that is thought about never with the same backdrop of mood, intention, physiology, and context. Even the claim “this is the same” presupposing a sameness of such-and-such is itself a new event.

Of the things that do seem to return, what come back are never what they exactly were. What we recognize is not the moment, but the echo of an echo of an echo. A pattern, loosely stitched from memory, as if it’s a real continuity. A feeling may seem familiar, a mood may feel like a cycle. But look closely: the texture is different, the light has shifted, the body is not the same. Even the sense of “ah, again…” is something new, arising now.

Thus keeping is a fool’s game. There’s nothing we have to keep because nothing is slipping away, because it was never the same to begin with. And because of that, there’s nothing to hold onto. Even clinging is made of newness. Even fixation is only ever an echo—not of what was, but of the impulse to reconstitute what’s already gone

That’s why everything liberates themselves. Not by resolving, not by being purified, but by vanishing into the next arising. Every moment is already halfway out the door.

everything is situated, or, contextuality is reality

Past classical anatta, past “no self in the seeing”, but in which that the category “seen” exhausts the real. Again, there is no ontological and phenomenological remainder, no noumenon lurking offstage, but also not mere phenomenalism or sensory primacy. Not idealism either.

In the seen, there is only the seen—not because the rest is false, but because, again, there is no remainder, no error term. “The seen” isn’t sensory. It’s whatever arises, whatever is. That includes abstractions, affect, memory, inference, the structure of coordination itself. Not in opposition to the seen, but as modalities of it.

Now as an extension to that, we then conclude: “everything is situated”

However, situated does not mean relative. “Everything is relative” is usually uttered in a hand-wavy, emotionally and spiritually charged postmodern way; that nothing matters, or that nothing is knowable. So not relative, but situated.

Situated means there is no view from nowhere. Every arising, every appearance, every knowing, happens from somewhere. And somewhere means context: a body, a time, a mode of attention, a substrate of conditioning, a world-in-formation, a frame, an assumption of consistency, a dependent origination.

Nothing is unframed. Even framelessness is a frame. Even “pure awareness” is experienced as such—which is to say, situated. Context isn’t added onto perception or understanding like an annotation. It is what makes it possible at all. We don’t see “a tree”, we see a tree-in-this-light-in-this-mood-in-this-moment-in-this-body-with-this-memory.

There is no universal/absolute/platonic/ideal/neutral/permanent “texture of a tree” because the very situation in which the texture appears—human sensory organs, mind, language—are reality, and reality always is framing, reality always is contextual.

An extension: there is no Absolute that is unconditioned and yet knowable. Because what appears, appears through entanglements of matter and information that are irreducibly situated. The jumping force of a frog is not “force” in abstraction, because it is genetics in tension with gravity in tension with environment in tension with perception in tension with coordination.

Each actions is a nested and interpenetrating co-arising. So if something is known, it’s contextually known. If it’s sensed, it’s as this, but that doesn’t diminish it. On the contrary: context doesn’t obscure truth.

There is no disembodied seeing, no view-from-above. There is reality-in-contact, the world shimmering into specificity, each time in a way it never has before and never will again. We can’t step outside of context to validate or invalidate it. This is it. There’s no reference point beyond the whole. And if there were, somehow—it too would be perceived in the context of how whatever appeareance is appearing right now.

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Now that we’ve got the background done, it’s time to move on to the ends: the end of insight, the end of symbols, the end of suffering, the end of separation, and the end of seeking.

the end of insight

Thus, this is insight as the end of insight as an axis of significance. Insight is not false, is not illusory, is not insufficient or unimportant, but insight, too, as everything else, turned out to not have a place nor ground to stand on its own. What does that means?

First: the ground has always been just whatever was appearing. In the previous sections, we call this as appearances, arising, whatever.

Second: the ground must be let go. The whole feeling of “ground” which is foundationality, ultimacy, explanation, are all local conditions, textures that appear when they appear, in the way they appear. And thus have no inherent essence.

Third: nothing is excluded, but not because inclusion is good, or true, or ultimate. It is that the very gesture of including/excluding is itself already in the field of relationality, of dependent origination, of co-arising.

Fourth: qualia, geometry, linguistic recursion, self-models, physics, felt sense, cosmology, metacognition, meditation, taste, attention, aesthetics, meaning—again, they don’t need to be justified as being real, or being appearances. They are already what they are, and what they are is nothing else but what they are situationally; contextually. They are not reducible to anything, but they are also not irreducible. Reduction and irreduction are both flavors, both stances, both already in-play, in the field of relationality.

Fifth: even relationality or dependent origination is a concept, scaffolding, context. It does feels deep, like a final frame, but only because it still orients. It suggests that things are defined through their relations, and that self/other, inside/outside, mind/world distinctions can be softened by tracing their dependencies.

And for those who aren’t familiar with the term, I mean relationality not as (solely) metaphysical substrate, but the felt orientation toward situatedness: conditions, context, and co-arising, however they show.

But orientation presupposes difference, and difference is already contained in the appearing. “This, not that” or “suchness” happens in the same field as any other frame. To put it another way: the frame, the category, the boundary—they show up as content, not structure. We don’t see via relationality; we see relationality itself arise.

Difference of difference, or what we call “boundaries” or boundary-formation, are themselves appearances. I vaguely refer to Derrida/Spencer-Brown, but it could also be described as “boundary formation as recursive contextual salience”

That is, boundaries or differences aren’t the inherent bounding of ontological objects, but flickering forms within context. Relationality can’t relate what only exists as already related. It can’t stand outside of the context to do the relating.

Sixth: and so, everything appears in the context of its own appearing. This is a restatement of the previous section (everything is situated) from another angle.

Seventh: and that includes insight, or seeing, or direct knowing, or however we want to call it. There are endless insights, but there’s no need for there to be any final insight. Insight does not need to inherently become anything anymore, because there is no remainder. There is no surplus. There is no horizon, because the idea of distance collapses when there’s nowhere to arrive.

There has never been a ground. No demand on anything to be other than what it situationally is, because the gesture of demand is another contextually-situated happening. No insight or knowing or knowledge or discovery are unreal, only that they’re situated. And that’s okay, because insight was never a cosmic duty. It was always a glint on the water, and glints are beautiful, momentary, enough. One more note is that insight is also never not related to actions, to conduct, but that is another thing for another time.

the end of symbols

Nope, not a renunciation of symbols, which includes language or math. Symbols aren’t false, or a second class in direct seeing. They aren’t even less-than. They do what they do: they trace, they point, they refer, they resonate, they bind, they cut, they name, they dance. Poetry is beautiful in the context of its own arising.

But something subtle unfolds here: it’s not that “symbols aren’t the territory” because that’s still treating symbols as second-order or second class, as if there’s a real somewhere else.

Instead: symbols (or symbolic language) appear in the territory. They are also the territory. They are how the world appears, sometimes. As gesture. As language. As math and computation. As narratives and myths.

To come at this from another angle: what we know as reality, or appearance, or arising, or however we want to call it, has no single ontic status, because ontology itself is context-bound. A dream’s reality and a waking perception are not comparable by intensity or vividness alone, but by how they function within their respective substrate of arising.

A frog in a dream and a frog in waking life differ not by “realness” per se, but by the affordances they activate, in which frog-in-dream is limited by our own memory and understanding of what a frog is. Thus vision in waking life doesn’t reveal reality per se. It reveals the human-conditioned rendering of it. After all, we can’t see tardigrades or feel Wi-Fi signals—most of us, anyway.

Maybe we’re a bit tired of this rhetorical style, but let’s do another neti neti: there is no split, nor duality. No privileging, no veil to lift. Symbols do not inherently obscure, but they also do not inherently reveal. They’re many ways that appearance appears—when it does, in the way it does, for the reasons it does (or doesn’t).

What ended wasn’t the use of symbol, or the capacity for abstraction. What ended was the thirst. The background project of using symbol to get closer to something, or further from something, or past something. To catch the Real, to undo the fog, to hold the Absolute.

The thirst doesn’t disappear by willing it to disappear, but to situate it upon each and every one of the thirst’s occuring—no longer organized as thirst-object—symbols, too, become another color, another modality of the seen.

the end of suffering

Pain, longing, and doubt still intermittently come. Right now I have gout attacks in my left foot that that repeat every several months, at least until my uric acid level drops below 5 mg/dL around the end of this year. My jaw tightens when I balance myself on train rides. Fear appears when I walk in very dark places.

But these arise situated within the context of their arising, rather than the kind of suffering that claims the whole field, the whole of mind.

So in a simplified way, we now have two kinds of suffering. The first is pain (real pain! valid pain!) as it appears: localized, arising within its own conditions. The second is suffering about suffering: the kind that reorganizes everything on the go. “Everything” here can mean meaning, identity, time, effort, worth, volition, metaphysics. The pain that says maybe they don’t care about me after all. Or the kind of pain that says this system is fucking broken and i am suffering because of the system.

It’s not like those utterances aren’t true, but in which the feelings behind those utterances are the second kind of suffering, and it always demands a response. The second kind always points somewhere else—some state away from the now, some state other than this. The parable of the second arrow.

But really, and literally, suffering appears when the conditions for its appearance are present. Suffering is part of what the world does when it does what it does. I know this sounds circular, but here’s the clarifying part:

Directly seeing what suffering is—seeing it as arising rather than as a problem-to-be-solved—means the stopping of the background project to make suffering stop being suffering, stop being suffering-shaped, stop being suffering-as-object. In a manner of speaking, it is the background process of trying to make it all right.

Even Buddha Gotama was not all right. He said to Ānanda:

I’m now old, elderly and senior. I’m advanced in years and have reached the final stage of life. I’m currently eighty years old. Just as a decrepit old cart is kept going by a rope. Sometimes the Realized One [Buddha Gotama is referring to himself here], not focusing on any signs, and with the cessation of certain feelings, enters and remains in the signless immersion of the heart. Only then does the Realized One’s body become more comfortable.

But for him, and for us too, suffering no longer needs to end, and that’s why it ends—again and again and again. Not finally, not totally, not metaphysically, not physically (although some of those points are debatable). Just in the way that all things end: when their conditions are no longer there. If the conditions return, so does suffering, and that’s what happens. If the conditions end, so does suffering, and that’s what happens.

And in understanding this, this becomes lighter, now becomes lighter. Maybe not less intense, especially for severe physical pain, but most definitely less total. Healing still happens. Tenderness still matters. Caring about relief, tending to conditions, seeking to reduce harm—all of this continues. They all appear in context like everything else. What drops away is the metaphysical overlay, the story that suffering means something is fundamentally wrong.

Because it’s always been this: context and conditions playing themselves in, then playing themselves out. Appearances arising, and appearances ceasing. Suffering is not an object. It can always be—if we read between the lines of the Four Noble Truths—seen through as the context and conditions it really is.

This seeing-through leads neither to detachment nor to disinterest in reducing the ways suffering can appear. What ends is just the background project trying to make it all right.

the end of separation

At this point, we just need to repeat what we already understood and repeated ad nauseam: separation is a modality of the seen, and therefore optional.

The final pseudo-neti neti: No gesture is needed to overcome it. No union is required. No return, no collapse, no merging. The very sense of separateness is already arising within what it claims to be apart from. It is not that there is no separation—just that it never divided what is already whole i.e., reality. Like a wave declaring itself estranged from the ocean.

The sense of distance, of being behind one’s face, or trapped in one’s head, or facing a world outside, which includes the everyday reality of dealing with other people—is a felt contour, a local topology. Not false, but not mandatory. Not an error, but kind of a flavor. Whichever semantic baggage fits your mind the most.

There is no One, no Many, and no bridge required between. Separation, like insight, like ground, was never a structure. It was always a mood. And like all moods, it passes not by force or effort, but by no longer being held in place.

We don’t move from two to one, or from outside to inside. Rather, the framing of “inside” and “outside”, interiority and exteriority, self vs. the world, start to loosen. We see that what appeared as partition was just curvature in the field: angle, perspective, shading. A feeling, a mood.

To say “I am separate” is to report a sensation. To say “I am not separate” is also a sensation. Neither grasp what’s already happening: the simultaneity of difference and inclusion, of form and field. The world isn’t other than this, and “this” or suchness was never other than the world.

So we stop trying to cross the distance, and that’s the end of separation. Already, already, already.

the end of seeking

It’s not that—at this point we already know what this whole neti neti charade is about, and we laugh. It’s the end of seeking, and it’s the start of everything else.