I’ve been rereading some of my books on Buddhism lately, some popular culture, a bit of fringe, and one book of the actual sutras. And I’ve been thinking… (I know, bad…)
I still just can’t quite get on board with no-form. It feels nihilist. It also denies our basic experience of living, which may, in fact, be nothing bur our interpretation of a reality that is basically formless at its core… In fact, I believe that to be true… But it’s not formless on the macro scale, that which we experience, that which we can sense, that which we are. That formless core may be constantly flowing and fluttering and basically indestructible… But we experience form. We have forms. We are bodies.
There is turbulence in the flow, little pockets of stability, swirling in place. As ephemeral as these are, they are tangible. They are us. They are the universe.
When Thich Nhat Hahn says there is no birth and no death, I understand what he means. There is no absolute beginning or end to the flow. It is all shifting change, with no creation or destruction. It is all interbeing across the universe.
I believe this to be true. But…
I was thinking about this and writing it down as horrible things were unfolding in Minneapolis, and I suddenly understood my uneasiness with this idea. No form, no death, no endings — it erases the murder of Alex Pretti.
No form erases much of what we experience as momentous, of consequence, important and meaningful. Because no form erases the body. It erases existence as we know it, which may or may not be existence as it actually is, but that is immaterial. Literally… This form, this body is who and what is and all it is. And this body absolutely has a beginning. (Ask your mother…) This body will die. (Ask Alex Pretti’s mother…) These are real experienced events. And while all that made up Alex Pretti is still here, Alex is not. Alex is gone. Alex will never be again. Because Alex was a unique living relationship in a physical material body. A small bit of turbulence in the flow of being. And once that turbulence breaks down, once those relationships are broken, once the body no longer functions as an organized relational system, there is no Alex.
In the older Buddhist texts, there is a good deal of scolding because we, material beings, will insist on being material beings, with hunger, pain, and general desire to be actively alive. To do things. To be animated. To contribute to and take sustenance from the world we embody. We do not willingly sit idly, wrapped in contemplation for very long. We feel it to be a grueling experience. Not because we can’t stop the chatter in our brains, but because we can’t stop the living in our bodies.
In any case, I don’t much believe in a mind. Not mine, nor some foundational consciousness permeating the universe. A mind is the activity of the brain. It is dependent upon the functioning relationships of the brain. Once the brain stops, so does the mind. So does personhood. Which is what Buddhism says of each of us individually… But then it turns that experiential knowledge on its head and says that, while there no disembodied you, no personal mind, no self, there is Mind and Mind is all there is. Disembodied and diffuse Mind is the core of existence. Mind is everything. We are just imaginal eddies in the eternal mind flow, rather than embodied matter in the flow of the universe (which may or may not be temporal).
Maybe the original meaning is lost in translation. Maybe what a Buddhist means by “Mind” is closer to what I might call “energy”. But even energy is embodied. It is all both. Both flowing wave and particulate matter. Always. At all levels. So if Mind is the basis of everything, then there is Body also, everywhere, always. Maybe the entire material universe dreams up this fundamental Mind?
But still, Mind as Ground Being seems like it could be true and does tend to explain things like deity… But it’s not how we experience our lives. We are not the whole universe. We are little bits of turbulence in the flow, both in material body and energetic mind. And when that relationship breaks down, the mind is as erased as the body. In fact, it seems to be true that the mind goes first… (So… where is Mind when the universe breaks down?)
The Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hahn is far more activist and embodied than older forms. More real. More resonant. It feels… right… With the qualification that I don’t feel entirely comfortable saying that there is no death… especially right now…
For one thing, that erases responsibility. No death, no ultimate erasure of a being, makes acts actorless. Which is neither helpful as a philosophy, nor factually true as experience.
Still, I understand the desire to merge this body-mind into the totality of being, to say there is no fundamental erasure of its constituents. It is comforting to know that all of me has lived as long as the universe and that all of me will continue to live as long as the universe. The crucial detail there is that who I am will not be after this small Earth-body organism dies. And we need to acknowledge that. Because saying you will live forever implies that this time in this particular body is not especially important, when, in reality, it is all you have. All you are. All you will ever be. This has implications for how you spend your time alive. There is no reward awaiting you in a next life. Deferred gratification means no gratification on the scale of a lifetime. If you are living a life that is not gratifying now… you are not living. You’re wasting your one bit of turbulence in the flow of the universe. You are not being you.
Obviously, our entire culture is oriented around erasing you, taking your life to feed it into the system. Taking your life and giving whatever rewards you might have garnered in this system and awarding those, instead, to the elites that control this system.
This not only harms you in existential ways. The sum total of these sorts of relationships is taking life from the whole planet. Even from the future. Maybe especially from the future. I find that profoundly unfair…
A while ago I started trying to figure out how not to contribute to this life theft. I came to the conclusion that the only way to stop is to stop… To extricate your life from the system. This is not an easy thing. Maybe not a possible thing in this present time. But that is the path that must be tread if we are to escape with our lives — and if any future We is able to live at all.
I have also been reading Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living for an Alternate Hedonism because that is my approach to muddling a path through this mess. Give people a reason to change and they will. Show them just how much they stand to gain and just how little they will lose. Hold up a clear mirror so that they can’t avoid seeing how miserable they are and how much of that misery is generated purely to support the system that is immiserating them. (Talk about circular economy…)
Then… dangle in front of them all the joys that await if they just step off their current path onto a new one.
Because real embodied life is joyful, healthful, vibrant, and, yes, pleasurable, hedonistic. Our bodies are evolved to feel pleasure. It is our natural state, not something granted — or, more often, withheld — by our culture. And it’s Just This Culture… Most lives, both human and non, most beings, most little eddies in the flow, experience pleasure, contentment, joy, as their default being, their ground state, their normal. Bodily pleasure is the normal relationship in the universe. Because bodies develop specifically to harmonize with other bodies and thereby co-create existence, spread life. Joy is what we are for…
But this culture strips that essence from each of us. We have created a system that channels reward, and very poor reward, to a very few people, while literally destroying everything else. By stealing our embodied contentment, this culture erases our lives. When we are just getting by, day by day, never feeling, never wanting to feel because it hurts too much, then we are not living. (Alex never was?…)
So, I’m reading Kate’s confirmation bias book along with the Buddhism, hoping to get tips. How do we get over this sham veneration of a ridiculous spartan puritanism that denies the working body its proper sustenance, its proper maintenance, its proper joy? All in the name of diverting the productivity of our living bodies to a cabal of soulless, dead-eyed elite assholes — who are apparently not even enjoying what they’ve stolen from us! How much more insult do we need to bear!
I don’t know if anyone has the answers, but something did occur to me…
All this want. Consuming culture. Obsession. Addiction. This is all brain malfunction. Being wrapped up in the mind, limiting experience to screens and virtuality, symbolism and language. That will never be fulfilling. We will never have enough, because our bodies get nothing out of it. It’s the same as trying to find meaning in sitting zazen… It will never be meaningful because our bodies are not experiencing anything while we are inert and isolated in our heads.
More problematically, our heads can never have enough. Our heads are wired to want. Our brains are want machines… But the body?
This is why our culture must measure wealth in money, a purely worthless symbol that, by its sheer worthlessness and intangibility, can accumulate infinitely. You can’t always have more stuff, but you can always have more dollars. And you will never stop wanting dollars as long as worth is measured only in those disembodied dollars.
This is equally true for all our status symbols. It is all disembodied and therefore physically meaningless. Unreal. Unlived. It is bounded by no material limits or bodily relationships. It’s all worthless, and therefore, intrinsically unfulfilling. Unfulfilling by definition and unfulfilling in actuality. You will never stop wanting more monetary wealth and the status it symbolizes. Or, more precisely, your brain, craving those electrochemical stimuli that makes up the sum total of brain-being, will never stop wanting — while there is no possible fulfillment from these stimuli for the rest of the body.
However, the rest of your body… Hm… yeah… The rest of your corporeal existence, experience, your body knows when it’s satiated. Knows what is enough. Knows what is too much. Your body does not want more than enough because more than enough is… too much. It’s waste, it’s harm. More than enough is a useless, often painful, mess that requires work to manage.
Think about reading, or maybe virtual reality, generally. You might read a really great sex scene that titillates your every nerve and fires up your imagination. Or maybe your gaming avatar is eating a delicious meal. Maybe this is a rather swanky VR simulation and you can taste the food, smell it, feel its texture in your mouth (not that we’re even close to being able to simulate taste or smell, as these are not simple sensations but complex interweaving of whole body stimuli and memory systems, unique to each body… but anyway…). When you finish your book or your imaginary feast, are you fulfilled? Do you ever look back on those experiences? Do they make up core memories? Do they, in fact, contribute to your remembered experiences at all? Are you ever satiated by artificial imagery and simulated stimuli in the brain?
No… Because your brain does not experience fulfillment. Your body, as a whole organism, does. To feel full, your stomach, your gall bladder and intestines, your pancreas and spleen and some of the abdominal muscles, all that must experience physical stimuli that has, in the body’s lived experience, formerly been experienced when the body has ingested sufficient mass, calories and nutrition. (Mostly mass… which is why you feel full shortly after eating a high fiber meal that has almost zero calories… though your body usually quickly realizes its drastic mistake and you feel hungry again before the food is completely digested…)
In any case, your brain is not terribly involved in registering fulfillment. It just processes incoming stimuli and sends out relevant messages. And, that being all it does, it will keep churning out those messages even when they are duped by empty stimuli. In fact, it “wants” to keep doing its job of data processing continually, without any regard for or possibility of fulfillment of its own needs, never mind the whole body’s. It wants those electrochemical signals, and that’s all it wants, no matter the body’s healthy level of satiation.
Your body, as a whole, not your brain in isolation, is responsible for determining and responsive to achievement of fulfillment. And that achievement is solely based on embodied needs, not imaginary stimuli, however much the brain craves those signals. Your body can have enough. Your brain can’t, at least not on the conscious macro scale. Maybe there are little brain cells that are subconsciously set screaming when the dopamine chasing gets out of control… but we aren’t consciously aware of those cries for help… although… maybe… maybe those cries are the still, small, intuitive voice of the conscience…
(And arguably, epilepsy might be the brain shrieking “STOP! TOO MUCH! NO MORE!”)
However that may be, your brain will likely demand that you go eat another meal, chasing those electrochemical pulses, regardless of hunger. It may send you searching for empty sex, however grossly unbased in emotion. In the best case on the individual scale, the brain will direct the body to seek out more artificial — but at least not physically damaging to the rest of the body — symbolical stimuli, like books or virtual gaming or social media. Or money and status. (But this, of course, leads to serious problems for the entire rest of the world…)
Moreover, over time, the brain begins to overrule the body’s regulatory abilities. It ignores the signals from the rest of the body that are saying “enough is enough already”. It goes seeking more and more and more. Because it can never have too much. There are no currently understood physical limits on brain activity. Even a healthy brain will crave more. But as time goes on with all brain stimuli and little experience of bodily fulfillment, the brain breaks down and goes rogue, while the body stops trying.
And this is the current state of most people in our culture. Brain-damaged. Unable to ever feel fulfillment. Always wanting. Never listening to the body’s actual needs. We’re all just stimulating the stupid, broken brain in a continual feedback spiral of want gone nuclear…
This has curious effects on the body…
You, with a damaged brain, may never stop wanting to eat. But you can’t physically consume more than a few fistfuls of food without rather extreme discomfort. Your body still recognizes too much, even under the influence of brain-damage, and howls in pain, even as it is submitting to the brain crazy.
And this is a good thing, because this is how we heal the crazy.
If you start to consciously listen to the body, consciously analyze those want triggers, it does not take long to re-member how fulfillment feels. Your body will begin to dampen that empty want. You will feel enough. With your body in charge of recognizing enough, if “you” up there in your befuddled mind start intentionally paying attention to how you feel, start listening to your real satisfactions from real material embodied experience, then want vanishes. Because too much is too much…
Remember my story of the pile of apples and the commons? If we, as a culture, listen to the wanting mind, the broken brain (itself continually created by and co-creating this culture of want), then there will always be some addled asshole taking all the apples from the orchard, raping the real commons for artificial personal reward. But that isn’t how it works in real embodied life. When sociologists study commons-based cultures, they don’t see much theft — and it’s not only because communities are policing the stocks. It’s because there is no reward in a pile of apples that you can’t use. A pile of apples is physically too much. A pile of apples is a stinking mess of rot.
Granted, in this culture of virtual reward, there are sick-brained people who will still take the pile of apples, trying to turn that pile into money. But unless you have ready access to a vast web of infrastructure that will distribute the pile of apples quickly to markets that do not have a sufficiency of apples, then the result is still a pile of rot. Which the brain-addled then must manage. Which is a learning experience, a brain-training mistake, a negative feedback loop if there ever was one.
You don’t willingly cope with actual too much more than once or twice, no matter the extent of your own brain damage. Actual too much is disgusting and difficult and painful. It is quite memorable!
What’s more, dealing with that pain is very effective emphasis on how little satisfaction you are feeling. Doing the grumbling drudge work of cleaning up a pile of rotten apples truly underscores the complete lack of real reward from virtual stimuli like money and status. Even your damaged brain starts to ask “What exactly am I getting out of this?”, to which your body resoundingly responds, “Exactly nothing, you fathead…”.
This is why community orchards succeed over time. Experienced people take what they need to feel fulfilled, and no more, which is much less than the output of an average tree, even when people are storing apples for the future. To illustrate, I can’t physically eat more than three small bins of apples through the fall, winter, and spring (and I eat from my stored apples every day that they are still edible). Far less than one productive tree is all the apples I need for a year of satisfaction. More than that, and I have to deal with rotten apples in my basement. (Which is definitely a mistake you make only once…)
An orchard of a few dozen trees can sufficiently satisfy all the apple needs for dozens of households, maybe as many as a few hundred households who don’t eat as many apples as I do. (I eat a lot of apples…) In other words, I could easily supply my entire neighborhood — about a quarter of my small town — with my quarter acre planted in apple trees. More than that, and we have a problem on our hands that our bodies will find distinctly repugnant no matter what our brains desire… (A quarter acre of unpicked apples and windfalls is serious stink…)
All this talk of apples is intended to show that our bodies know what is enough — and to show that enough is really not a lot. It’s our broken brains picking all the apples; our healthy bodies only want a few. But luckily even our brains learn pretty quickly not to grab too much — as long as we are physically interacting with the apples, when we are doing the apple picking, when we are dealing with the smell of excess. However, when broken brains direct other broken brains to take all the apples and the pile of rot is shunted all over the place — usually dumped on people who had nothing to do with the apple picking — then there are no penalties in too much. The damage is done elsewhere to Them, to other bodies
Indirect control, management, hiring work done, these all interfere with our bodily feedback loops telling the brain that enough is enough. Remotely controlling people never experience the rot.
This suggests that a way to retrain our cultural brain is to make people who give directions experience the effects of those directions. Money and status and all the other symbolic rewards never make up for having to live with waste and harm and pain. Actual piles of stink are a really effective curb on brain-damaged want. For example, if we made it illegal to ship electronic waste to places like Egypt and Bangladesh, and instead sent all that back to the manufacturers, you can bet that there would be much less manufacturing, regardless of profit loss. Because there would be no real profit. Even if the owners of these industries remained untouched, nobody would work for them in those conditions for long, factories would be inundated with waste material, and there would be no way to produce anything new amid the mountains of mess.
This works to fix broken brains even faster on the consumer side. It’s impossible to be detached from your own basement of rotten apples. And if you try to force yourself to eat the too much, life becomes really uncomfortable, really fast. Our brain’s want is silenced with only one such mistake. So, all we need to reduce demand is to make demand physically real. Force us all to live with the too much. Make it illegal to throw excess away, dumping it on distant bodies — who certainly recognize too much when they see it… Too much in reality invariably negates any virtual rewards and teaches us the truth of enough.
And then, after mistakes are made and lessons are learned, then we begin to notice the real bodily satisfaction of having just enough — and that is always incomparably better than empty symbols that always leave you wanting.
And this is what, I think, we need to be talking about in terms of hedonism. Or, in less gluttonous terms, in terms of living a life of fulfillment. If we live fully in these bodies, if we listen to our actual needs and experience the effects of too much want, if we are present in our lives and not wrapped up in our imaginary minds and the false rewards of this broken, brain-damaged culture, then we are fulfilled. We are happy, content, free of want. We may still have imaginings and cravings, but if we let our bodies make decisions, then we won’t act on those impulses.
For a while, we might still savor those imaginings as imaginings, but it won’t take long to realize that the imagination delivers very little satisfaction. Yes, an occasional imaginary escape from pain is good… But pain is much reduced when we are listening to our bodies and meeting our biophysical needs. And empty stimuli are far less effective at relieving pain than doing things that are good for our bodies. A virtual feast of all the most sweet, intoxicating, savory, exotic and impossible flavors is nothing compared to a real bowl of warm nutritious stew. And the most acrobatic, libidinous, prolonged and passionate virtual sex can’t compare to an actual kiss between embodied lovers.
With time, we’ll spend less and less time in our heads until even the brain stops wanting those unfulfilling experiences when there is all this wonderfully satisfying life to live.
Because those satisfying experiences are not brain experiences. Those are the body. The whole relational, sensory, interwoven organism. And only that organism can feel… anything… properly… never mind enough. It’s the body that feels… And it knows satisfaction…
I think that this is the path — living fully in the body with its enough and the occasional mistakes of too much. So much harm is eliminated if we simply deal with our waste so that we learn what is enough. Because waste is eliminated when we have to deal with it. We do not generate it. Taking on our own too much is the way we stop generating it. And this is the way the system that depends on being fed that flow of excess will die. Which is wonderful!
But look at the other potential rewards… Living in your body is the way to make life better for you and for the rest of the world. It is the way to force the implosion of the system that incarcerates us all and steals our lives. But living in your body is also the meaning of your life.
We have been yammering about that question for as long as we’ve been human, mostly because those who yammer are from social groups that benefit from these systems that erase us and refuse to talk about life without those systems (perhaps are so brain-damaged they can’t see alternatives). Their ability to yammer, to live socially prominent lives, is utterly dependent on taking rewards, taking lives, from other bodies. The food they eat, the clothes they wear, the houses they inhabit, all are produced by others, most of whom are not able to produce their own embodied needs because they have no time or resources to do so while laboring to make these elite yammering livelihoods. (And no working body is ever fully compensated for this loss — if there is a valid compensation for lost life. None are even rewarded with the full monetary value of their production, never mind real world value of food and clothing and shelter.)
Yammering is enabled only through beliefs that claim there are second chances at living for all those whose lives are taken. They might be slaves in this life, but there will be future lives in which they might have a chance to live. This dualism is the only thing keeping people at work in the service of this stratified system of rewards and harms. Of course the yammerers can never afford to gainsay the eternity of a disembodied essence, of a soul, of a person that survived the body’s demise. And of course everything we’ve said on the subject of meaning has always been constrained by the extreme injustice of a complete lack of meaning for all the lives taken.
The truth is that all the yammering has steadfastly refused to see the real truth. Life is this body. There is nothing else. The meaning of you is your living experience, your body, you. The meaning of the universe is the universe. Existence is the purpose of existence. When we ditch this system of stolen lives, we reclaim meaning. All the questions drop away. All we are is being and being well as these little eddies of turbulence of the magnificent flow of existence.
Do you know how fulfilling that is? To know your life’s purpose and then to embody that purpose? There is no greater reward. Talk about hedonism!
Living your life is the highest pleasure.
But also…
Knowing that your body is you frees you to live. You don’t need deny your body. In fact, you should not. You should live your body to its fullest possibilities. Knowing your body is you and all there is of you inspires you to be the best you you can be. You will undoubtedly go do something good. Because this good you do with your life is who and what you are. Your entire purpose and meaning. Everything else drops away, leaving you free to be the best you.
And this is true for every body. Which has relational effects…
Knowing that your body is you for every body, that this life is all we each get, all we each are, that makes the theft of lives and livelihoods an absolute violation. There is no possible recompense or restitution. Murdering Alex Pretti has taken away his only chance to be Alex, to be anybody, to be. The wage slaves who deal with your electronic waste will never get to be themselves. The urban poor who cook and clean and care for our children, and never have time or resources to manage their own needs, to care for their own children, they have all been erased by our culture, by your too much — and there is no compensating them for the theft of their one life.
Recentering life on the body reveals the utter immorality in the ways that we live, in the ways that we steal other lives. (Of course, the yammerers could never talk about that…)
This is where the idea of no-form loses its moral fiber. If there is no form, there is no offense, no harm done…
But if form is all there is, there is never justification for ever harming another body.
And that is the light that will lead us out of this rotten, brain-damaged culture…
Into a life of joyful hedonism…
©Elizabeth Anker 2026
By My Solitary Hearth 