on groundlessness, a brief note:

There's an analogy I use sometimes, where I say people start out as "mostly ice." That is, our bodymind "structure" is sort of "mostly frozen". It's kind of like only the surface of the bodymind is sort of continuously melted and re-frozen, or it exists right on the edge of water and ice. That surface is sort of where people typically learn, unlearn, and grow. But the "bulk of the ice," the "depth" of a person, mostly doesn't change. (This isn't a perfect analogy because there are tendrils and threads of "liquid" all throughout the thing.)

And so, meditation, over time, very slowly, helps the whole thing to "melt," to become water. Again, the analogy isn't perfect, because water or liguid is sort of "structureless." But, meditation doesn't make us forget, as it were. There's something lossless, recoverable. The thing that's now liquid isn't arbitrary; it retains its contingency or dependency on the past (while also in a sense transcending it but never cutting it off). So we could say there's "structural fluidity."

The nice thing about water (and structural fluidity) is that it "spontaneously knows how" to take the shape of its container--maybe a weirdly shaped vase or a bucket or a teacup or a cube with the top face missing. In the case of bodymind, the "container" is one's entire life situation--past, present, expected future. And "taking the shape of" is something like "emotional/​behavioral alignment" with "the circumstances of one's life." Importantly, loosely speaking and to over-reify, this feels wholly good and correct from the inside, all the way down, radically endorsed. That is, nothing changes in this way unless, sort of, "you and the whole system" want it. It feels natural and correct in a "couldn't be otherwise" sort of way. And it's not passive acceptance; it's dynamic, proactive, alive engagement with the territory and everything, a spontaneous and proactive reshaping of one's environment. I don't mean to oversell this or over-reify it. This is sort of too clear-cut or even hyperbolic. It's very normal, natural, un-special, self-re-settling, just living. There's wellbeing! But also it's imperfect; it's lived. And life can be really hard, and bad things happen, and so on. These are just ideas, just words, flawed, making "this" too much of a "thing." And one might creep up on "it" by degrees, nonmonotonically, fits and starts, with a looooooong asymptotic "fat tail."

(Another way to extend the metaphor is talk about "surface areas" that are open/​available/​exposed to experience, open to the air, as it were. If someone is mostly "frozen," then, as above, there are sort of only thin surface layers that can change, in contact with the world. And those layers are sort of structurally constrained by everything beneath them, or at least what's immediately beneath them, and so on. It's like the whorls, whirls, patterns, fingerprints of that surface can only take particular shapes, can only make particular patters. Anyway, when things start to "melt," it's more like icebergs floating in water, then ice cubes, then slush, and so on. So, it's sort of like the surface-area-to-volume ratio changes, experience makes-its-way to (previously-)deeper "substrate," more easily. More is "exposed," immediately labile [and this only happens if and when it's safe]. The analogy isn't perfect because there's still "locality" in terms of what changes when, and things do and don't really speed up as the "pieces" get smaller. But anyway, the grain gets finer and finer and it can be a nice analogy. Thanks to a collaborator for participating in extending the metaphor in this way.)

(There's one more way to extend the metaphor which connects back to nonmonotonicity. I've mentioned this in another section of the document, too. When a person is mostly ice, and when a person is mostly water, things are relatively stable/​"stable". But, in between, when things are melting, and maybe chunks are breaking off, falling, and splashing/​crashing around, things can be pretty rough. Ideally, it'd be a "smooth melt" from like top to bottom, but it can be hard to manage and predict, as the system's just spontaneously doing as best it can, as it were, imperfectly able to know what's going to happen next (and perhaps it it were otherwise everyone would just already be enlightened, etc., etc.)).

So the above is sort of an exoteric way to talk about structural fluidity and life niches and things like that. But we can take it a step further. What follows sort of inheres in the above. Regarding the above, one might imagine "melting" involves refactoring of one's goals, plans, perceptual ontologies, action ontologies, preferences, general wellbeing, etc., all of that naturally settling into a new overall shape. Along with that, the very being and seeming of the world changes.

But it's worth emphasizing that everything is included. The past and present, time itself, space, personhood, metaphysics, the phenomenal world, the universe, logic, language, concepts, platonic-ish ideas (like perfection, infinity, eternity, ...), meaning, the "container that holds the water, itself,"" nothing is left out. We might metaphorically say there's nothing to stand on, anywhere. There's no ground. Or, there's no ultimate basis, no set of basis vectors, no fundamental LEGO pieces. There's a way in which everything, all of that, is self-complete, turning on itself, inverting on itself, and completely-self-complete itself, morphing, equilibriating in space, and therefore(?) sort of utterly interconnected and interdependent on itself, and self-relational and self-referential, in and of itself. (There are several ways/​senses in which bodymind, world, etc., can be said to be interdependent, and this is just one of them.) So it's "all groundless," and all of this, all at once, is "groundlessness."

It can be kind of scary (or terrifying) and even infuriating, at times, a sort of "yes and even this." There's nothing stable, no perfect forms, nothing to hold onto--not ideas, not meditation instructions, not experiential states, not philosophies or ideologies or stories or beliefs or anything.

But again, the bodymind generally doesn't let go until it's safe to let go. (And please don't try to "make yourself" experience groundless or to try to see it. It just kinda happens over time, with correct practice. If you have to make it stick (or even just give it a little push it into place!), it's not the thing. But also if you find yourself trying to make it stick (or even just give it a little push it into place!), that's normal and ok!) Eventually one might see how it's actually safe and preferable and sort of radically stable in its liquidity. It's maybe more like slow syrup or something than water.

One might ask, what's the relationship between groundlessness and other things like emptiness, luminosity, bare sensations, etc.

Some messy thoughts: Regarding emptiness, I was equivocating a bit, above--is it e.g. "the universe" that participates in groundlessness or, sort of, "one's representation of the universe." I would say "yes, both" in sort of the sense that we only know about "out there" by what we experience "in here," and we might find, over time, that there maybe must be a sense in which anything "out there" must lack essence (and is thus impermanent, non-eternal, interdependent, and radically dependent/​contingent on causes and conditions), must lack essential nature, and at the same time our representations thereof must indicate provisionality and nebulosity. And there's another sense in which there are no representations and no referents, anywhere--and this ties into luminosity (in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard.) This paragraph is a bit philosophically muddled and it gets some of the arrows wrong. Very compressed, just a confused taste. Bare sensations kind of connect up with all this in that, on the one hand, they're not a "special ontology," they're empty, conceived as such, just like everything else. And they're not really a resting place--we need coffee mugs and cars, not just patches of light and color and blips of sound, or whatever. But on the other hand, they sort of point the way out of "inner space," i.e. sort of a whole bunch of unnecessary, out-of-phase stuff (e.g. some senses of self-ing and thinking) that the bodymind is doing "in here," that is/​are ultimately optional. (I use scare quotes, "out there," "in here" because ultimately there's no real boundary between "inside" and "outside,"" cf. nonduality, etc.; "In here" is sort of that which untangles and untwists and un-wraps and un-spikes, in participation with the changing of the very being and seeming of the world, and also the musculature, and...) And, bare sensations are sort of the "surfaces that glow," cf. luminosity and sort of that which is one-dimensional or flat manifolds, hanging in "empty(!) space." This is very gestural and maybe not super prominent in experience, cf. normal-ness, naturalness, ordinary-ness, etc. (Thanks to a collaborator for helping to elicit this.))

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Notes:

• related p3 here