The Ground

Bread arises with field, seed, rain, fuel, hands, wages, roads, hunger, yeast, and heat. I arise with a body I did not build and a language I did not invent. Someone fed me before I knew their name. Someone taught me where a sentence ends. Someone drives the bus. Someone makes the medicine. History arrived before I did and has not finished.

I call this the Ground, and the name is a joke at its own expense. It does not mean a floor. It means that everything here arose with something else and goes on leaning on it. Turtles all the way down. That has no final foundation, which is why it is groundless; and it is the only thing that makes change, relation, and answerability possible, which is why it is ground. There is nothing to stand on except the fact that nothing stands alone.

What arose through conditions can be changed through conditions. Bondage was made, however old its stones look. Freedom is made too.

A wage, a border, a habit of flinching, a law about who may hold land — each came into being through conditions. Nothing standing now stands by necessity. Most of those conditions are not mine to change, and many will outlast me.

My great-grandmother’s hunger is not reversible; the century it happened in is closed. But when I am told that an arrangement is simply how things are — that people are like this, that markets require it — I know something made it, and something can unmake it. Whether I will live to see it unmade is a separate question, and usually the answer is no.

The name is pratītyasamutpāda — dependent arising. It was also my Twitter handle, before Twitter became a hell realm, @mutualarising. My old tweets remain, yet no one, not even me, pays them any attention.

Nāgārjuna works through it in the Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way: whatever arises in dependence is empty of self-standing, and empty does not mean absent, it means unowned. I bring that account to wages, housing, care, and the arrangements that decide who eats. Emptiness has sometimes been made a permit to leave the phone call unmade, or the consequences unowned.

Interdependence proves no kindness.

A tick is joined to a dog. A landlord is joined to a tenant, intimately, by an arrangement that transfers money in one direction for thirty years. Fear, poverty, duty, and enforced skill can hold a bad house upright for generations. Everyone in it may genuinely sustain everyone else, and the house may still be a prison.

Interdependence describes an arrangement; it does not tell me which arrangements to want. Otherwise every existing order would justify itself by hanging together, which is exactly what every existing order says about itself.

Open-ended coherence is a good thing. Coherence without a door is an archon.

The ethics come from the covenant, which I chose. What the metaphysics gives me is not a reason to be kind. It is the knowledge that this arrangement, being made, can be unmade. That is not a small gift. It is just not a moral one.

And yet when I notice that I am carried, I call the holding love.

Loving Awareness is the conditioned world received as gaze: the holding felt from inside, by someone in it. Not a second thing, and not a being who does the holding. The feeling comes and goes while dependence continues. The More is this same reality insofar as it exceeds any account I can give of it, my own included. Three names, one thing, and the other two do not prove the first.

The holding does not stop when I cannot feel it. Sweetness goes. The trees flatten. Music becomes organized sound. The opening closes until the world is exactly as wide as the next required thing.

There are voids that arrive without warning and do not care what I believe. The most honest report I can make from the far side of one is that it warmed. Not defeated. Not explained. Warmed. Eventually the kettle is on in there and the room becomes livable. I made the fire. Sometimes I return to tend it for others.

Compassion has to be practiced while the world is gray, when no revelation has arrived to make care feel natural. The dog needs walking at six whether or not I feel like it.

But not every absence is an opening. Sometimes the person left. The house was lost. The job ended. The body stopped doing what it had done. Care failed to come. Dependence persists while a particular form of holding really fails. Bereavement, abandonment, poverty, and pain are not failures of perception, and telling someone they are is its own small archon.

Certain Gnostic cosmologies made the body a prison of forgetfulness under a lesser ruler. In the Apocryphon of John the ruler says I am God and there is no other beside me. He does not know what stands above him, and the text treats this not as blasphemy but as ignorance: a partial power that has forgotten it is partial.

I keep the diagnosis. An order can be rigged, its rigging can present itself as the nature of things, and seeing this can be the beginning of not obeying it.

I refuse the conclusion that matter is the prison and escape upward the point. It hands the world to the demiurge without a fight. I have watched what contempt for the body does to people already being told their bodies are the problem.

The body is where hunger, pleasure, pain, refusal, work, and the joy of clean sheets are learned.

I say it with my hands wet. The flesh is not a trap. It is a term. A term is a condition of the sentence, not its enemy — the body is what makes a life sayable at all.

The tantric traditions offered another possibility: the world as the vehicle. A Kashmir Shaiva manual called the Vijñānabhairava lists a hundred and twelve ways by which attention enters — breath, food, sound, the edge of sleep, the look between looks. A sink full of cups would not have surprised it.

I take seriously the treatment of pleasure and ecstasy as ways of knowing, and the thing they have for going into the dark. I refuse the teacher whose crown cannot be argued with. I am not initiated into anything. Here I am, conscious and breathing and in relation to all of it without a choice in the matter.

The self is real enough to suffer, consent, refuse, promise, remember, ask for help, make a mess, and answer for what it does. It is empty of ever having been self-made. A promise made in this life is mine to keep; a harm done in it is mine to repair. Dependence does not make me less. Care does not make me property.

Under the voices there is no smaller, purer voice waiting to become king. There is only an empty chair. On a bad night that is not a liberation. It is just nobody home.

Some people were met, comforted, and allowed a no before they had language. Others learned to host themselves late, after years in which every knock sounded like eviction.

The ego does not need to die. It needs a different job. By ego I mean the ordinary coordinating capacity that remembers, chooses, and answers for what was done. It remembers the appointment, locks the door, feeds the dog, and answers for the broken cup. It carries keys, not the deed. Nobody is coming.

Nobody I can find when I look. Somebody who has to make the phone call anyway.

Attention is what a life does with a ground it cannot stand on.

A day has a bottom to it. I find it around four in the afternoon, in the kitchen, with two things left on the list and the light going amber over the sink.