For madmen only. Hesse, Steppenwolf

This book begins where book one finishes, with the sale of the school in Beijing.  It takes the form of a diary.  I understand that a diary, especially one drawn from a real life, is off putting, but I felt compelled to complete the story in this way.  Whether or not this compulsion has been vindicated may depend on the quality of the life that has emerged from the wreckage; a life of contentment, surrender and love. This book was written to help bring about my own self liberation from suffering.  It is for me. If anyone cares to read it, I place here a stipulation, like that preceding Steppenwolf: for madmen only.  You will never finish this book if you do not qualify.

Be forewarned. The book consists of ruthless self inquiry, reveals barbaric darkness, piercing loneliness, black despair.  It ends though on the first step along the path to equanimity, reconciliation, bliss and love.  In its course it traces from the perspective of this transformative present the ominous onset of MS, the growing understanding of Buddhist methods of self liberation, and the gradual dissolution of a hyper-defined sense of self.  It shows the painful birth of love, and an indefatigable need to create and to understand supplanted by the birth of equanimity and content. 

For years I had been writing so hard in an effort to understand myself, and then I realised that all along I had been writing effortlessly in the diary. I consider this work as an experiment, to examine the way in which life unfolds, without the imposition of narrative, or any points to prove. I wanted to describe a life lived without fictional tension or false symmetry.

The discourses of history, science, and politics, as well as the trivial discourses of social media, pull us into them, load us with spurious identities, make us feel we exist as part of them, though they are illusion, born of the Imaginary.  Zen indicates that essential truth can only be experienced in the here and now. The constructions of  fiction divert attention from the lived moment, offering us illusory structures in which to hide.   

I think that in this book I have pulled at the knot of this aggregate of Meaning in narrative, and Meaning in presence.  In constructing the larger part of the book from a series of present moments, I have tugged at the knot between narrative constructed as narrative, and the way in which a proto-narrative unfolds from a series of presents.  What are the differences, and what does this difference say about Reality?

Engaging with the myriad discourses that explain the world leads us away from Phenomenological Truth: creating fictional conflicts and resolutions leads us away from Phenomenological Truth. Phenomenology and Zen have in common a wilful, Daoist ignorance in their unwillingness to inhabit Narrative Constructs, as these distract our attention from the real conditions of the living moment. In this book I have attempted to eschew the distortions of fictionalisation, and instead inquire into how a succession of present moments – the daily diary entry – embody the rhythms of an actual life extended through time, like one of those tictok reels where someone has taken a portrait of himself daily at the same spot, and assembles these to show change over time.

This query into Meaning is also, perhaps most importantly, an interrogation into the relationship between consciousness and time, how time interfaces with consciousness, interjecting pasts and presents to flood the here and now. I attempt to unravel this knot by tugging at it from within.

The three books are meditations on the nature of time, approached from different angles. MWOT2  exists in an extended here and now.  Each entry emerges from the position of the present moment of writing.  There is no distance between the book and the here and now.  It shows how narrative and self are continually constructed out of nothingness, and maintained through self reflection. 

On November 5, 2022, the work of daily accumulation had been done. I had two million words.  The effort now lay in the task of daily diminishment.  I tried to strip away all that was false and superfluous, and keep only that which I felt had significance.

This work proceeded in tandem with, and in support of, a transformation of the self, a reconciliation with the past, and acceptance of situation in time.  Book Two ends on November 5, 2022, and Book One begins on June 20, 2023, on the first step along the Way. 

I built all of this to let it float away, and leave me lighter.