NOEMAYA

The color is beige; it’s the old, familiar, uninviting space that makes you prefer going back to sleep. Nothing stimulates, and everything feels like too much effort with no point in sight. Oh, it’s a barren land, an abandoned, barren land so intolerable that men and women would rather choose depression than stay here. It’s perfectly democratic: everything is equal, and nothing stands above anything else. There’s no direction; no compass moves in this land. In fact, nothing moves, and nothing that moves ever stops. Nothing can act, and nothing can change. The whole place makes me nauseous. Calls are made but nothing lands. No meaning completes itself. Nothing calls us here; all is deaf and dull.

Imagine you’ve been exiled here for the rest of your life. You’re given an abundance of resources to make it a home, but one thing cannot grow in this soil—value. This land strips every incoming thing of intrinsic worth; all things arrive here to become absolutely equal. Nothing has more or less importance than anything else. And with all the resources in the world, how can one act at all unless one acts for something that calls us?

Yet imagine this is the land to which you are exiled for life. It’s all yours. You have total freedom to shape it as you wish. The one condition that never changes: you cannot import values. No value ever crosses the border.

Here, even light has no value. There’s no sun or source of light that rises or sets; there is uniform, homogenous light; there is no east or west, no north or south. The lights stay on. The temperature is always in the 60s. The wind blows in all directions or none, and it makes no difference either way.

There is absolute freedom here, and yet no one visits willingly—let alone stays. Where there are no values, no hierarchies, no preferences, everything makes equal claims on us. And no one can really bear this condition though everyone praises it in abstract. In fact, everyone will find it nauseating.

But remember that everything that is, all states and conditions that visit our minds and souls, are nothing but Being. Reality is instantaneous encounter with the elusive and ineffable Being, and Presence is nothing but the infinitely small point of this tangency, and the illusory world, this cosmic experience, is nothing but the heat of this friction, this eternally obscure encounter that the finite mind can’t overcome except through collective myths and personal narratives.

This land too is one aspect of Being—the belly of Being. It’s the land that grows the more you feed yourself with incentives and excitements. The more you make early withdrawals of values from Being, the larger this barren land becomes, waiting patiently for your exile.

And oh, the worst people are the ones who cast their nets over Being and force it to conform to their own conceptions: Being as good, Being as noble, Being as beautiful, Being as innocent, wise, etc.: all the virtues that religions and their modern heirs, this blind science included, have hammered into their one-sided ears. They associate truth with whatever gives them comfort and a semblance of safety. How naive a man must be if his argument against God is that children get cancer. Take him to this intolerable land, the belly of Being, so he can see how this undeveloped sentimentality has nothing to do with the truth but rather is only shielding him from experiencing the belly of Being: how he subconsciously projects his own innocence onto the child and his fear onto the disease, setting them against each other as if one were more valuable than the other.

This preferential living—this picking and choosing of Being—is the habit of those who’ve avoided the belly of Being their entire lives. Most people call it boredom, and it’s the essence of boredom that I am talking.

And it is there that the ugliest and most horrible things stand equally with the most noble, because nobility is not in the appearance but in the Being. One who hasn’t been exiled yet sees double: the terrible and the good standing opposite and against one another. But the one who stands on the belly of Being has a different vantage point. He sees only what is—not what follows; he stands courageously at the point of tangency and doesn’t fall back into the comfortable duality of secancy. Here, where everything is, the sacred and the profane, both are, and both participate equally in the nobility of Being. There is as much evil in good as there is good in evil.

And it is only there, on that dry belly, that the superman can be raised and trained to rise from the ashes of the despicable last man, in the absence of all values and in the coldest winds of barren Being—where he learns to act not because something calls him, but because he is the one who calls. He is the only thing that can grow and bear fruit in a barren land. He has no values outside of himself, from collective myths and personal narratives; he needs no world: he is the world, he is value precisely because he is what is, that is, in living and acting in full anonymity of Being.

As for me—I want to fall in love with boredom. I sense a treasure buried there, behind all the distractions that keeps us from encountering boredom and becoming curious about it. But also let’s do what we always do: steal the fire from the gods and lower it to our own level by making daily wisdoms out of it: Learn to tolerate boredom. Don’t act because you’re bored; act within boredom and not out of it. Don’t try to escape it. If you want to become whole, you must encounter and accept the whole of Being, the whole of what is, whether it pleases your sensibility or not. Let boredom swallow you whole, and see what remains standing after the dust settles. Standing on the belly of Being, one gets to experience the highest and lowest vantage points of life, both the lowest and the highest, for belly is that part of a man that can get the farthest from him and return closest to him: Being never ceases to breathe, to respire and inspire.