A friend of mine suggested it might be a good idea for me to turn my extensive ramblings via text message into a Substack account - ostensibly to the end of making a profit.

That ostensible purpose is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. But, the notion of engaging in public, online journaling is of interest to me. So, I’ll give it a shot.

In terms of what to expect as a reader…well, first and foremost - who cares at this point?! If someone actually begins to read then we’ll cross the bridge of their expectations. In the meantime, I just want to see if I can shunt my notions from the feverish thumbscape of my shitty android screen into this space with any consistency and sense of personal value.

Thankfully, I have a great deal of seed material to work with and elaborate on from other sources of mine - and seeing as most everyone reads most anything in the false hopes of uncovering that perpetually hidden reserve of Unobtanium commonly refer to as the “Truth” - it seems fitting to me that my first post here be a repost of a short essay I wrote on a different forum under a different alias regarding Apotheosis.

Actually, as far as a “what to expect” post is concerned, it’s quite fitting. You can expect I may write about everything and anything - just don’t ever expect to find any Truths.

Apotheosis:

1. the highest point in the development of something; culmination or climax.

2. elevation to divine status

I recently called belief in Apotheosis humanity’s "original sin," a hyperbolic cannibalization of Christian etymology that perhaps muddies the waters unnecessarily. Let me make a better stab at it.

Belief in and/or striving for Apotheosis - as the word is generally used and as its dictionary definition implies – is humanity’s oldest vestigial defense mechanism against stagnation and despair. It amounts to a species-wide act of metaphysical sublimation – redirecting the conglomerated mass of our individual fears and uncertainties into the pining after an infinitely diverse set of impossible perfections.

The set of those perfections contains both obvious and, to me, not so obvious members.

Among the obvious are notions like God, An Afterlife (whether Heaven or Hell), or history’s litany of spiritual/secular cult leaders and their ostensible preturnaturality (e.g. Marshall Applewhite or Adolf Hitler). Also included are more banal notions, like our day to day pipe dreams – permanent happiness, persistent inner peace, freedom from suffering.

Among the less obvious are any and all ideals – the imagined “perfect” form of anything, whether a piece of artwork, a wooden box, a house, a family, a child, a parent, or oneself. Even (especially?) ostensibly objective categories are themselves based on an implied comparison to imagined ideals - Words like Good and Evil, Sacred and Cursed, Friend and Foe, True and False – societal norms of race and gender – or, directly relevant to this sub[stack], Buddha and Sentient Being, Enlightened and Unenlightened.

Apothoesis is the human brain’s fundamental fiction – that there is an end to our efforts – a place for us to arrive at – a point above or beyond which further progress is not possible – and therefore, by reverberated implication, that there is an objective thing called “progress” or “progression” in the first place, something more than our paltry, impermanent efforts at comparative documentation.

Apotheosis is the grain of sand around which the rotten pearl of "searching for Mind with Mind" amasses – a longing for some thing or some state somehow, fundamentally, beyond. For me at least, in reading Zen texts (and looking at artwork, reading poetry or books), Apotheosis manifests as the essentially metaphysical belief in some hidden, deeper meaning. In considering application of Zen texts to my life, Apotheosis is the striving to somehow get it right.

Hell, as I write this, I have to be constantly wary of a whole new Apotheosis – the Apotheosis of being in a state without Apotheosis, a kind of setting “limitlessness as the boundless void."

I'm no an Apotheosis abolitionist [To elaborate - I’m not suggesting we eliminate the word from the dictionary] - I'm just here to raise awareness. Because an ongoing awareness of the pervasive presence of Apotheosis, in all its myriad forms, seems consistent with Joshu’s “family custom" of “Having nothing inside, seeking for nothing outside.”

It seems consistent with HuangBo’s warnings

“Anything possessing ANY signs is illusory. It is by perceiving that all signs are no signs that you perceive the Tathagata. Buddha and Sentient beings are both your own false conceptions, It is because you do not know real Mind that you delude yourselves with such objective concepts. If you WILL conceive of a Buddha, YOU WILL BE OBSTRUCTED BY THAT BUDDHA!!!”

It seems consistent with Foyan saying

“People with clear eyes do not settle complacently into fixed ways. The reason you haven’t attained this in everyday life is simply that your eyes are not clear. If your eyes were clear, you’d have attained it. That is why it is said that people with clear eyes are hard to find. As soon as you say “This is thus and so,” that is a complacent fixation; people with clear eyes are not like this.”

So.... be wary, that's all. Clear your eyes! Keep them peeled. You'll be amazed by all the places you've squirreled apotheosis away.

Edit: it sort of goes without saying, but I'll say it - this is informed by my own experience - and really any broad generalizing language trying to blow it up to the human race is fundamentally conjecture and in a real sense are just stand ins for "me" and "I" and "my".

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