Thoughts From a Sensory Deprivation Tank

The whole world is constantly eating itself

The whole world is constantly eating itself at all times. That is obvious. There was a cow in a field somewhere that was killed, crushed, and chopped into a hamburger, which a pregnant woman ate, which put flesh on the fetus in her womb. The fetus grew into a baby, was born as a person. During life, that person might eat 500 hamburgers. That same person might have maybe 25,000 bowel movements, if they are lucky. All of that is eventually eaten by microbes, building their bodies and excreting the rest, which then builds the soil that grows the grass that feeds more cows, people, microbes, soil.

In the world of thoughts, cognition, ideas, something similar happens. Someone says something, mostly it's re-cogitation from other ideas, snippets, sayings from elsewhere. Perhaps the idea is compelling enough to people at that time and place that it gets picked up and keeps getting picked up, and perhaps it is reinforced all over the world for a time. It has nothing to do with the value of the idea, and everything to do with how compelling it is to various human animals, and what these imaginary selves think they are missing, what they are hungry for. Andrew Tate has 10 million Twitter followers, I hear. This one Bible app has 100 million downloads. Sometimes an idea is held for a while, maybe millennia, until it goes by the wayside—dying, decomposing, recomposing perhaps into something else, something unrecognizable. The suttas say that even gods are subject to arising and passing away.

What a situation. The mind freezes in the face of it. Despite its pretensions, it was mostly built to determine if one rock is bigger than the other, or if this wild and dangerous animal is 1,000 feet in front or 10 feet behind. In moments of rest, it dreams that all this locating in space and time suggests a self at the center, and that this self is better or worse than others.

What a situation. Once assessed, the mind naturally seeks liberation.

The famous Bahiya Sutta is a direct pointer to liberation: "In the seen, only the seen; in the heard, only the heard; in the cognized, only the cognized..." With no self doing the seeing, hearing, cognizing. In womb and in tomb. The noise of the body being built, the body decomposing. Who is there to hear it? These were thoughts that arose in me, in a float tank in Brooklyn, hearing the sounds of the body, digestion, the cells of the body being replaced.

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