Tag: entropy.

• 11111101010.1

  pondering—purpose.

  Maybe purpose means so much to so many is because it is our bulwark against the unconquerable tide of entropy? How strong must the motivation be to engage in an unwinnable war?

  poetry—senescence.

  Memories and opinions

  are merely stations

  along the train journey of being,

  soon to be loose

  in the rear window of the caboose.

  Nothing lasts.

  Loss, at half-mast.

  Yet, this existence—subsistence

  then senescence—

  is as it is.

  prose—flicker.

  He stared intently, drawn in more by instinct than inquisition—the butter lamp flame waved gently back and forth, mimicking the drafts undulating through the small stone hut.

  Cross-legged he sat, deep in acute awareness of his movements as his hand moved from lamp to lamp, hovering over each momentarily in mantra before moving to the next. A thick haze hung in the air, drawn from the many incense stick lit around the room. He was unsure how long he had been sitting, alone in the square shack, as time had a way of acting like a rubber band during retreats—in a way mocking our human expectation, or insistence, that it is linear, continuous, obligatory. The single window barely allowed any light—reflecting the decades of use the hut had seen as a hermitage, generations of saints, seekers, and skeptics having locked themselves away here to journey through awareness and the mind.

  Occasionally his concentration was broken by the caws of crows and voices of vulture—omens and oracles, both. Shadows and shapes shifted on the walls, sparked by the luminal interference and decoherence of the butter lamps. His mind was drawn to reimagine and redefine the shape of the darkness, creating stories and meanings—a hope for definitions amongst the randomness. He smiled weakly at his thoughts chasing the threads of purpose, the need and necessity of our consciousness to construct ceremony from the void, acknowledging the apophenia.

  The nagging of negation flowed through his body, each aching in a different medium—physically, mentally, emotionally, socially. Food, water, sensory inputs, and conversation had all been in very limited supply since he withdrew into retreat. And yet, the greatest gains come from the most acute austerities—contraction into the condesate of consciousness.

  2026.11.01

• cognition.

  Perception a faulty recognition of the past,

  Reality a projection, parsed by what minds cast.

  Hologram of information and entropy so vast,

  the mind manipulates the broadcast,

  insistent on truth ‘til the very last.

  2026.10.28

• witness.

  As it had done ceaselessly for the last 4 billion years, the sun crept above the horizon. Turning the indigo sky shades of orange and yellow—along with a river of bright white darting out across the ocean’s surface—the golden orb signalled the dawn of a new day.

  Bats turned in and birds awoke, beginning an ornithological orchestra that fell on deaf ears. A breeze arrived, whipping up the sand whimsically before mindlessly dumping it and moving on. A mother oystercatcher admonished her chick—high-pitched life lessons screeched squawked up and down the beach. Dark clouds in the distance, initially a churning of greys, dissolved, defeated by the arrival of a stern southerly. No one was around to record or reminisce, these repeated scenes unseen by human sentience, a morning left to unfurl without perspective nor preconceptions.

  Yet—and yet—as eyes pass over these words, experience itself cannot escape the morning breeze.

  2026.10.04

• sit.

  The night sky. As comforting as it is confronting. Tonight it would be her zendo, her meditation hall, as she sought to blend the inner and the outer, the finite and the abyss, the now and the forever.

  She had hiked the high glacial valley walls during the bright daylight hours, and with the day coming to a close she found herself on a rocky, exposed ridgeline—exactly where she wanted to be. The words of her guru refracted around her skull; it was he who had told her the kind of space—not only physically, but spiritually—to seek out, and this spot seemed perfect. From her bag she pulled her zafu, the round meditation cushion she carried with her almost everywhere; worn, tattered and well-travelled. And several moments later, a rolled-up royal blue rug—the threads of luscious lapis lazuli reminiscent of the descending dusk—emerged from the bag as well, which she unfurled with a snap. Right leg folded under left as she made her way into lotus pose.

  Pulling the cowl of her robes back, she felt the ever-so-fair night breeze on her shaven scalp. She tilted her head upwards, mesmerised by the Milky Way, now furled like her rug, in all of it’s ancient glory. The astral arch—omnipresent and omniscient—held the memories of every sunrise, every breath, every death, that has ever taken place. A river of stars, it meandered towards its mouth, before dissolving into the sea; the ocean of her awareness. Of the awareness. All awarenesses. The memory of origin, of what was; though, also, what has always been. The night sky, now black as pitch, dark as the abyss of self-delusion. A finite Universe containing infinite multitudes, bound by a timeless time, a deathless death. Enclosed entropy, a swirling churning maelstrom of birth, death, and rebirth, where everything stays the same.

  2026.09.20

• delusion.

  Delusional about the personal,

  perception is apocryphal not foundational.

  Weaving the liminal and temporal,

  into a fallacy of the continual.

  Doubt in deduction of the dual,

  awareness is a single jewel.

  2026.09.16

• cylinder.

  His legs stretched out in the shade as he made more notes in his notebook, scribbles now filling up the margins, the only remaining space. Geometric constructions and complex algebraic equations created an impenetrably dense wall of knowledge, making his work visually off-putting to most. Today, as the midday sun bore down, a date palm delivered him shade, allowing him to work uninterrupted. A gentle breeze touched his cheek.

  As he scratched an itch on his side, he noticed his ribs were more pronounced—the past weeks, as he honed in on solutions for his work, has had neglected food and comfort; his work all-encompassing. Notebooks—stacks and stacks of them, as well as loose leaves of crumbled and folded paper, scattered all around his house—contained the synthesis and syncretism of ideas and theories from far-flung thinkers, old and new. Diagrams and schematics of geometries that warped the mind, graphs plotting exotic equations, mathematical alchemy and esoterica; theoretical threads he hoped to pull into answers, solutions to reality itself; as if that needed to be solved.

  He sat the notebook down softly beside him in the dry dirt, closed his eyes, and let out a sigh. The sigh evolved into a deep exhalation. Then an inhalation; the cycle repeating. And then again. He wasn’t sure exactly what drew him in, and back, to his childhood as an orphan at that monastery in the mountains. Remembering how the monks used to guide them in meditation, he crossed his legs and sat up straight. Decades receded in his mind—before his time as a renowned thinker, before his time as a young professor, before his time spent travelling to far-flung lands to study, before he left the monastery, before everything.

  Slowly he opened his eyes, his gaze drawn upward. Mouth agape, he saw the sky as a monumental rotating column, stretching as wide and tall as was possible in every direction. Slowly it turned, a towering cylinder of shimmering indigo iridescence, though at this moment he wasn’t sure how much he could trust his own perceptions. The very essence of existence was being projected onto the inner surface—people, houses, trees, himself—all mirages. A salty tear ran down his cheek. Overcome with awe and abject astonishment, he witnessed the geometry of his notebooks in motion, the two-dimensional informational base of all that is. More tears flowed as realisation set in—this was it, all there was. The bedrock of being was not something solid and enduring, the tombs of kings, but rather ephemeral and ethereal, flickering and fleeting. All that he—that anyone—had lived and breathed and died for, decried as fundamental and final, was nothing but conjurings from the surface of the cylinder.

  In the distance, plastered on the wall of the cylinder, he recognised a mountain formation from his youth; he hung his head. It was all an illusion—a hologram projected onto the consciousness. Hopes, dreams, fame, infamy; all phantasms of the great, cylindrical construction. He had nothing, was nothing. His face softened. He was free.

  Combs of cirrus clouds appeared on the column, before being projecting into the sky, then dissipated just as quickly.

  2026.09.13

• equanimity.

  Rebuke of now’s quintessence,

  is blocking unmediated experience.

  Yet, such is such,

  and the rest a crutch.

  Craving the fable of stable,

  we revere and enable,

  all we’re able.

  Destined to detritus,

  is the experience of all sentience.

  Object-obliviating omnipresence,

  the essence of presence.

  Finding ease in the degrees

  of the unknown frees.

  Contentment in possibilities and probabilities,

  peace of sight and sensibilities.

  2026.09.02

• ritual.

  Obfuscate obliteration,

  ideas pulled into oblivion.

  Dissolution of information,

  on the exhalation.

  Hubristic construction,

  an arrogant comprehension.

  Temporal disintegration,

  annihilation in meditation.

  Inversion of expectation

  in the subversion of separation.

  A return to origination.

  through ritual connection.

  2026.08.26

• incantation.

  Yet-to-be thought,

  mindfulness in nought.

  Sit in the unknown,

  before bliss has flown.

  The moment we decide,

  peace we deride.

  Inside concepts and ideas,

  we find egos and fears.

  A breath, a pause,

  delays thinking’s maws.

  Vacuous fluctuation,

  total deconstruction,

  multidimensional incantation.

  2026.08.09

• tide.

  Like a prize Persian rug, resplendent threads of azure and cobalt stretches the breadth of both the horizon and the imagination, twinkling like lapis lazuli and sapphire under the hot Summer sun. Every day, the ocean is here; yet every day, she reveals a different facet, different angle to her beauty, to those curious ones paying attention. Infinite, yet formless and forever changing, the sea serves as an enduring reminder to the constant churn of change. Swells form, only to collapse; tides rise, only to fall.

  Shear stoic cliffs of ancient rock stand as sentinels at each end of the beach, shepherding the swells around the headlands. While not in frequent flux as the ocean far below, the old faces still show the scars of an endless battle with the elements. Deep crevices are torturously, methodically, carved into the rock over millennia—death by a thousand cuts of the wind and waves, lingchi by weathering. Stories of old recall old rock formations and old fishing spots and old blowholes, though now lost to the current inhabitants—new ones have emerged, though no doubt only to be a memory again in a generation or three.

  Beyond the blue rug and above the worn faces, the night sky moves in timescales beyond the human mind. Machinations and geometries shuffling and jostling over lifetimes, aeons. Fathers to sons, mothers to daughters, can only reflect knowledge of stagnant stars; it is curious grandchildren, enthralled by parchment and papyrus, scrolls and zij, that peer far back enough in time, that glimpse the changes. Yet change they do. Slowly. Surely. Galaxies grow before growing apart, stars shine and are then snuffed out, gravity wears and warps; but only to observant gods.

  Tonight, a full moon—an opal hoisted in the deep black—casts a pale glow, bathing all beneath in chalky shades. The frigid ocean water stings a little as the waves wash up the beach, engulfing her feet before retreating again, as it always does. She knew her feet would warm up—or at least become accustomed to the temperature—in a few minutes, as they always do. Thoughts appeared to her, only to wash away like the tide, as they always do.

  2026.08.02