I almost gave up on submitting an article for this issue. I’ve had the flu for a few weeks now and the weather hasn’t helped. I became congested on October 13th, around the same time that God was coming down with a bladder condition. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the largest trunk on the biggest woolly mammoth to ever walk the Earth never produced as much mucus as my nose did in the following days. On top of this, my sickness has made me stupid. The 40 Watt bulb I call a brain has been coated in several layers of fungus, so it’s having a hard time illuminating anything right now. I’m barely reading, and whenever I try to ponder political or philosophical issues I end up in the same place: silently debating whether or not to drown myself in a tub of bubbling hot Neo-Citran.

It’s as though my imagination, my ability to perceive possibilities, is faltering. That’s truly unfortunate, because it wasn’t very impressive to begin with, especially when compared to the minds of some of my personal heroes like Noam Chomsky, Leonard Cohen, and Anais Nin. These are minds like the Sun, capable of revealing entire worlds of possibility. Even when it’s functioning very well, my own can barely dispel the shadows of a single bedroom.

As my mind has dimmed, I’ve been motivated to think about the relationship between incarnation and imagination. By incarnation I mean the way that the imagination is supported by a physical substrate, how the natural condition of consciousness is crucifixion upon the tree of circumstance. As for imagination, my views on it have changed over the years.

I used to agree with the position outlined by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943) and The Psychology of the Imagination (1948). Sartre believed that imagination is essentially a kind of negation: we negate what is by imagining what isn’t, introducing the nothingness of possibility into the solidity of being. Nothingness is free, but being is bound by causal necessity. According to Sartre, the two don’t mix well. Instead of incarnation, he used the term “facticity” to refer to the concrete details about a person’s life that limit freedom, that circumscribe nothingness. For example, a person without any artistic talent doesn’t have the freedom to become a great painter. For such a person, the ugly being of the canvass can’t be negated by a beauty conceived in nothingness. Sartre described the encounter between the nothingness of mind and the unyielding facticity of being as “nausea,” or disgust. I can relate.

Sartre would look upon my illness as a form of facticity, as the incursion of being into territory formerly held by nothingness. From this point of view, imagination is like a crack in the unending granite expanse of being. During my sickness, the walls have begun closing in. This foreshadows my elder years, when my brain will become ever-more vulnerable to sickness, stroke, and atrophy. My death will be a final victory of being over nothingness, the complete closure of the chasm.

The trouble with Sartre’s view, as with that of many existentialists, is that he sees consciousness as alien to the universe. For Sartre, consciousness is an ultimately inexplicable aberration, a bizarre and unnecessary intrusion into unthinking being. And yet the human nervous system isn’t anomalous at all: it’s a product of the same physics that underlie everything else in the universe, and that in their entirety constitute the universe. Furthermore, his position is fundamentally dualistic, with the same basic problem that mind-body dualism has always confronted: if being and nothingness are fundamentally different, then how can they possibly interact? How can the freedom of nothingness affect the causal necessity of being, or vice-verse? And surely the universe is far more chaotic than Sartre acknowledges. In fact, the universe in this instant is only a momentary configuration of endless possibilities, a wave of actuality arising from an infinitely larger cosmic ocean of turbulent potentials, an ocean that physicist David Bohm called “the implicate order.” Nothingness in the sense of freedom and possibility isn’t an aberration, but rather the background condition that the universe, moment by moment, arises out of.

For these reasons, I now believe it makes more sense to agree with Baruch Spinoza that matter and mind are two phenomenal expressions of the same transcendent reality, or with Alfred North Whitehead, that consciousness is a latent property in all phenomena, or with the mystics, who describe the universe as a holographic universal mind in which every phenomena is inter-related and inter-dependent with every other, and in which the whole is reflected in each of its constituent parts. In Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (1977), Francis Cook uses the metaphor of Indra’s net to describe this last viewpoint: “Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each ‘eye’ of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.” For the Hua-Yen school of Buddhism, the net symbolizes the universe and everything in it, including the human mind.

Rather than talking about diametrically opposed absolutes, of quintessential being juxtaposed with quintessential nothingness, it makes more sense to talk about degrees, varieties, and moments of consciousness constantly emerging from, reflecting, and falling back into ever-changing configurations of possibility. Imagination, or consciousness in all its forms, is a temporary actualization of turbulent potentiality. Imagination doesn’t negate being, it reveals the underlying ground of being, the chaos of the eternal flux beneath the order of the passing form.

That form is incarnation, and the experience of crucifixion is the anguish caused as the form disintegrates. Since the form, while it lasts, is always undergoing cycles of integration, disintegration, and re-integration, crucifixion is incarnation’s constant state. Since the imagination undergoes these cycles along with the body, I suspect that Sartre’s nausea is really what Buddhists call “dukkha,” or the additional suffering produced as the imagination struggles in vain to rescue the form from the flux that is its essential nature.

My sickness is a kind of disintegration, of crucifixion. My essential nature is asserting itself every time I blow my nose. More intense disintegration is on its way. I turned 40 this last year, and two months after my birthday I learned that my eyes, which once enjoyed 21/20 vision, were now nearsighted and needed glasses. The turbulence of the flux is getting stronger, and the form is slowly breaking up. Nothing I can do will stop that, but maybe, with the right attitude and discipline, I can do something about the nausea.

In the meantime, watch out for me. I’m infectious and irritable, and I’m passing the point where I care who I sneeze on.