Spilling the beans

[Jirh]

On 12/05/2026 at 5:50 PM, tsuki said:

The most important feature of the story is that it wants to be played out, it needs to reach its conclusion. All stories have a charge, innate motion which is a compulsion from its origin to its conclusion. They grab us and take us places, we participate.

The experience of participating in a story is called emotion. We can always make the story explicit with language by experiencing the emotion. When the story is expressed, we can inspect it more clearly. In inspecting the story, we make it into an object of the mind that we can manipulate. In doing so, the underlying emotions change. We can completely decouple stories from emotions, which is to say that we stop participating in them, by not believing them. The more we believe a story, the less it is an object of the mind, the less we can manipulate it, the more real it appears and more emotions arise. We build stories ever since we were born as a person and a lot of stories have not been expressed and are still believed/participated in. There are no emotions apart from participation in a story.

I cannot confirm this, because some stories, no matter how much inspected, still have their full effect. Inspection simply adds awareness to the story. But it doesn't necessarily have an active role. It's mostly a passive observer. Our (mine at least) stories don't create our emotions. It's probably the other way around.

[tsuki]

18 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Empty space or blank screen are something. Nothingness is non being, no space, no process, no relationship, no change. Saying that unlimited relative change is nothing make no sense, because it's relative change. Nothingness is non existence, and precisely doesn't exist 

You are using the conventional understanding of concept "nothing" as an ontological argument. Since you clearly have a very sophisticated view of reality, I'm sure you know better than to treat conventional notions of what something is seriously.

What I'm saying when I'm using the word "nothing" is that there is no independent ontological grounding to anything that exists. We agree on the principle, but you disagree with me on semantics. You are saying there is only being and I'm saying that everything that exists is dependent on something else, so is not existing in the strict sense. It is appearance without substance, so in essence, nothing. All being collapses under careful observation, no things can be found. 

Yet, the totality of it can be dependent upon itself precisely because there's nothing there. It's something like a circular argument, refining itself infinitely. That totality is still nothing, without substance, and it's precisely the point. It may look more like infinity to you and that's okay.

 

[Breakingthewall]

13 minutes ago, tsuki said:

You are using the conventional understanding of concept "nothing" as an ontological argument. Since you clearly have a very sophisticated view of reality, I'm sure you know better than to treat conventional notions of what something is seriously.

What I'm saying when I'm using the word "nothing" is that there is no independent ontological grounding to anything that exists. We agree on the principle, but you disagree with me on semantics. You are saying there is only being and I'm saying that everything that exists is dependent on something else, so is not existing in the strict sense. It is appearance without substance, so in essence, nothing. All being collapses under careful observation, no things can be found. 

Yet, the totality of it can be dependent upon itself precisely because there's nothing there. It's something like a circular argument, refining itself infinitely. That totality is still nothing, without substance, and it's precisely the point. It may look more like infinity to you and that's okay.

 

It's a line of profound contemplation, much closer to reality than invoking a dreaming god as a deus ex machina, but the fact is that if there is a "substance" to what appears, it is the fact of being, and this being is a consequence of the limitation that reality is.

You could say that being is not something concrete, but it is. Reality cannot not be because it is not limited, so relative motion occurs without origin.

You could say that the ultimate substance of this relative motion is emptiness, nothingness, but the fact is that this limitless relative motion is substance itself. It is the totality.

Absolute emptiness is the ultimate door to absolute fullness; it is not something rational but an opening that occurs within you through which the totality is revealed. And for this to happen you have to open yourself to the absolute void.

[tsuki]

@Ziran @Stick @No1Here2c I appreciate you guys, thank you for participating.

44 minutes ago, Jirh said:

I cannot confirm this, because some stories, no matter how much inspected, still have their full effect. Inspection simply adds awareness to the story. But it doesn't necessarily have an active role. It's mostly a passive observer. Our (mine at least) stories don't create our emotions. It's probably the other way around.

If that's the case for you, I sympathize. There has to be a lot of confusion. Keep chipping away at it. I've been in therapy for 10 years ever since I had my first enlightenment (fucked me up real good, the depth of it). I don't want to give you an impression that I'm free from stories, but there's very little compulsion left, mostly around food and basic survival.

 

[tsuki]

53 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

It's a line of profound contemplation, much closer to reality than invoking a dreaming god as a deus ex machina, but the fact is that if there is a "substance" to what appears, it is the fact of being, and this being is a consequence of the limitation that reality is.

You could say that being is not something concrete, but it is. Reality cannot not be because it is not limited, so relative motion occurs without origin.

You could say that the ultimate substance of this relative motion is emptiness, nothingness, but the fact is that this limitless relative motion is substance itself. It is the totality.

Absolute emptiness is the ultimate door to absolute fullness; it is not something rational but an opening that occurs within you through which the totality is revealed. And for this to happen you have to open yourself to the absolute void.

I sense that you are unsure of what the ultimate substance of reality is. All I can say is this: keep staring away at it until it disappears. 

I have a sense that my reply is quite anticlimactic, but I'm all zinged out for today. I appreciate you though, I really enjoyed our back and forth.

[Breakingthewall]

19 minutes ago, tsuki said:

All I can say is this: keep staring away at it until it disappears

It could disappear, but I can't disappear. Open your heart, in it is everything. Reality lives. 

[tsuki]

14 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

It could disappear, but I can't disappear. Open your heart, in it is everything. Reality lives. 

I think part of the difficulty here is that I am not trying to derive metaphysics from abstract reasoning alone, nor am I speaking merely psychologically. I am trying to speak about metaphysics through direct observation of experience itself.

The problem is that when something this fundamental is discussed, the mind immediately pulls it into a privileged framework:
- psychology,
- biology,
- physics,
- spirituality,
- logic,
- systems theory,
- theology.

Then the insight becomes interpreted as being "about" that domain.

What I am pointing at is prior to all of them because all of them already appear within experience.

This is why I keep returning to observation itself.

When something is observed carefully enough, its apparent independent reality starts collapsing. Not because thought destroys it, but because the mind initially presents things as more self-existing and separate than they actually are.

A thought appears independently real until inspected.
The self appears independently real until inspected.
A process appears independently real until inspected.
Even "being" appears independently real until inspected.

And under sufficient observation, everything dissolves into:
- relation,
- dependence,
- appearance,
- distinction,
- movement,
- context.

No final thing can be found anywhere.

This is not a logical trick or conceptual game. It is directly observable. That is why I keep insisting on looking rather than merely thinking.

And this is also why I use the word "nothingness", even though it is easy to misunderstand. Not because there is no appearance, but because no independently existing thing can be found within appearance.

The fact that everything comes apart under observation is not an unfortunate limitation of the mind. It is the revelation itself.

Reality is not hiding somewhere behind appearance as a final substance. The impossibility of final ontological closure is precisely its nature.

And this does not reduce the aliveness of reality in any way. Quite the opposite.

If reality could finally crystallize into some fixed independently existing thing, it would become limited by it. Closed. Exhausted. Finished.

But because no final thing can be found, reality remains inexhaustibly alive. Open. Moving. Revealing itself endlessly without ever collapsing into dead substance.

Its emptiness is precisely what makes it alive.

[Breakingthewall]

2 hours ago, tsuki said:

The fact that everything comes apart under observation is not an unfortunate limitation of the mind. It is the revelation itself.

Reality is not hiding somewhere behind appearance as a final substance. The impossibility of final ontological closure is precisely its nature.

And this does not reduce the aliveness of reality in any way. Quite the opposite.

If reality could finally crystallize into some fixed independently existing thing, it would become limited by it. Closed. Exhausted. Finished.

But because no final thing can be found, reality remains inexhaustibly alive. Open. Moving. Revealing itself endlessly without ever collapsing into dead substance.

Its emptiness is precisely what makes it alive.

17 hours ago, tsuki said:

 

This is correct except for the term emptiness. The foundation of reality is the absence of limitations, that is not something, but neither nothing. It's the fact of being unlimited, or having no limits, but the word "nothingness" or "emptiness " doesn't point to the real nature of reality, "everything" would be much more accurate. 

In spirituality the word emptiness is used due Buddhist tradition, where an empty mind is considered true and a full mind maya, but this is just Buddhist bias. An empty mind is a pre requisite to open oneself to the unlimited, that is full because it's absolute potential. Then using the word empty is just confusing and really it's false, because it doesn't point to the true nature of reality. Unlimited would do much better.

[tsuki]

@Breakingthewall I use emptiness precisely to avoid turning the unlimited into another thing. I even call nothing not-a-thing .

 At this point, I think that we're not in disagreement, it's a matter of choice of words. 

Edited 9 hours ago by tsuki

[tsuki]

Continuing.

The person is not real.

This does not mean that the person does not appear. It means that no independently existing person can ever be found.

The person is a maintained appearance.

And the maintenance happens through belief.

Not intellectual agreement, but participation. Taking the person as real. Participating in the stories that continuously recreate it.

The person is maintained through:

identification,

emotional reinforcement,

anticipation,

social reflection,

bodily distinction,

narrative continuity,

participation in self-stories.

There is no separate entity underneath these processes maintaining them. The maintenance itself creates the appearance of the person.

The self is not something that has stories.
The self is the storytelling.

The self is not something that participates.
The self is participation itself.

Belief is what gives the person apparent reality. The more the stories are taken as real, the more solid and independent the person appears. The less conscious the participation becomes, the more absolute the self feels.

This is why the person feels threatened by observation. Observation reveals the movement maintaining the appearance. The more conscious the participation becomes, the less independently real the person appears.

This is also why all suffering is ultimately tied to survival.

The person survives by maintaining distinction:

me and not me,

inside and outside,

self and world,

subject and object.

But existence itself only happens relationally. Nothing exists independently. Everything dissolves into relation, process and appearance under sufficient observation.

So the person is trying to survive as something fundamentally impossible:

an independently existing thing.

This is why the separate self is inherently unstable and compulsive. It must continuously recreate itself because it has no independent existence of its own.

And this is the great reversal.

The person cannot truly survive by strengthening itself. It survives most deeply by disappearing.

Not physically.
Ontologically.

By releasing belief in the self-stories, by no longer taking the maintained appearance as independently real, the apparent separate self starts dissolving. The boundaries weaken. The compulsive distinction between self and totality weakens.

And what remains is not annihilation, but reality without separation.

This is why so many traditions speak of death.

Not because death is glorified, but because the separate self cannot survive realization of its own unreality.

The “death” is the collapse of false independent being.

And paradoxically, this is true survival.

Because what survives is no longer:

the isolated character,

the maintained appearance,

the narrative identity.

What remains is the totality itself, which was never separate in the first place.

The essence of the person is the same as the essence of the whole:
not a thing,
not a substance,
not an independently existing being,
but open, living nothingness.

This is why the final realization is not that the person becomes God.

It is that the person was never there to begin with.