A friend has asked me to include my current streams of thinking, along with the other events that get posted here. Usually I have not shared these thoughts, because they are always raw and often untested — I prefer to let them settle until an essay is born. But here goes the experiment: At the core of our being there is a point beyond which there is nothing else. This means there is no core. What surrounds the core-of-not-being is every idea or fiction erected to permit this nothingness to survive intact in the endless sea of moments that pass us by. To remove the fiction is to admit oblivion, and only two types of people can survive such a willful annihilation: those with a will to die and nothing to lose, and those who have faith. The erecting of barriers between one’s own nothingness and the nothingness beyond it is like images of light which create something for us to watch on an empty screen. An audience full of eyes, fixed on a blank panel, enjoy a wealth of imagery depicting scenes that are not there. Unreal, yes, but also entertaining. When the images are stopped, there is a vacant hollow, a terminal boredom that creeps up and overtakes the conscious mind. Deeper, deeper, until the last wall cracks and the void without meets the void within. This is the death of the self, but also the integration of the two parts of one being, since nothingness itself permits no boundaries. And with the reintegration of the psyche, a fulfillment. It is not a fulfillment from the completion of any idea — having disbanded ideas. Nor does it point toward any conceivable goal. It is instead the feeling of an existent being existing in the mode of its existence. The harder we try to exist after a particular fashion, according to a particular ideal, the more impossible the fact of simply living must seem, and the more secretly terrifying the idea that such a life cannot be. Letting the walls dissolve, all things are beheld in reference to the self-that-is-not-self. If this were not possible, then after dissolution would come a vanishing. That this does not occur, that those who survive madness go onto something more real without having anything in common to any imagined reality, is sufficient proof there is nothing to be afraid of.