Those who really understand working out know that you are not really trying to gain anything, to alter your bodily form from what it is now from what you think it aught to be. You are centering fully into where you are. You are trying to experience life to its fullest in this moment. It is a spiritual experience. No different than any mystic in the throws of deep prayer. But the difficulty is that we do everything, even religious self-imposed religious suffering like Lenten fasting, under the assumption that it is all being done to get us somewhere better. With improvement as the motivation we miss the opportunity to do it. Change is the result of doing one's best at experiencing the emptiness inside in this moment. Improvement is a byproduct. Once it becomes the focus it is missed and no number of gains will make you feel more fulfilled. The ironic thing is that focusing on the improvement can be exactly what's keeping you from it. No, we tear ourselves down when we work out, so that we can be closer to the source of our being, be closer to nothing.

All living people hold a satisfactory enough version of the world – that is we’re all here so we haven’t thought it better to kill ourselves yet – and therefore, those of us that are still here fall into three primary states: we either want to reaffirm belief in that satisfactory enough version of the world and say “I am fully who I want to be” and just look for people who reaffirm that (this is what I call the deluded non-alienated being). Or we want to improve ourselves in some way, admitting we live “between who we are and who we want to be” and we look for the world to tell us who to be and how to be it (this is what I call the alienated being with the delusion of future non-alienation). In both states our communities are what provide that non-alienated service to us, allowing us to live in the delusion of a now or future wholeness. Communities are always necessary, but these two states are always unfree, for those fully bought into their community are always a slave to that community’s non-alienated fantasy.

The third state is different, for it is counterintuitive, yet it’s where the possibility of freedom arises. It is when we live “between who we are and who we want to be” BUT without ever pedestalizing our desire for a non-alienated state, without ever caring if “who we want to be” is achieved. This is living in the embrace of alienation, in a perpetual no-man’s land, still part of communities, yet freed from the ideologies of those communities. This is not “giving up.” Giving up can only apply to the cessation of persistence towards a future non-alienated state. In this state we still hold ultimate concerns, concerns for which we would gladly die, yet we are not enslaved to some finite version of that concern. In actuality, in this third state, I know the ultimacy of my concern can never be achieved, and this acknowledgement is what allows me to live well in no man’s land. In fact, in this third category my alienated state of non-achievement becomes my heaven, and community can be exposed for its seductive tendencies towards empty promises.

In baseball, this no man’s land for the fielder is exactly the place where the baseball must drop for exciting action to occur on the field. This no man’s land for the runner is exactly the place where he must courageously run for the possibility of scoring. We must willingly enter no man’s land to attain the unattainable. It is only in this place that attaining changes its meaning from "getting an end state" to "getting the never ending act of attaining itself."

The only thing more impressive than an all-powerful being creating the universe, is the lack of an all-powerful being creating the universe. This is the concept offered, in a way sarcastically, by Douglas Gasking, a professor of philosophy in the late 20th century, to a group of friends and made popular by Richard Dawkins in his book, The God Delusion in 2006. It posits that it would be a greater achievement for a ‘creator’ to create the universe if that creator had a disability. As, with all else being equal, it is a greater achievement for a pitcher who’s missing a hand (like Jim Abbott) to pitch a no-hitter in Major League Baseball than it would be for a pitcher not missing a hand. Taking this idea to its end, the greatest disability we can comprehend is non-existence. Therefore, the greatest being to create the universe must be one that does not exist.
 
Of course, there are many ways in which this ‘proof’ of the non-existence of God breaks down as it’s scrutinized. Yet all scrutiny pre-supposes one thing, that for something to be created, it had to be accomplished by a Being.  We first, as an unconscious fundamental position, place God in the context of pure, perfect Being-ness. Even the mere utilization of the word God in the prior sentence comes with a sense of an image of a sacred object that exists that we can point to. An object that builds other objects. Even if, over time, we’ve pushed this object further and further out of the visible realm, we still imagine it (i.e. 'Him') existing somewhere. Even if we feel, like Anslem did, that God is greater than that can be conceived, theist and atheist alike still fall victim to what John Calvin describes as the idol factory of our minds.
 
Initially this perfect man-like image of God, like the one painted by Michelangelo reaching towards us on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, seems correct. For as men and women we, at first, comprehend creation as something built by someone or something and see no other way to create than with hands. Over time this is rightfully revealed as an idolatrous vision, one which we must destroy to move towards truth beyond our own phantasmic projections. However, if we can recognize our predisposition for creating images (idols) to represent God, then a step towards destruction, odd as it may sound, would be to begin down Gasking’s path and imagine that Being having a major bodily impairment, like an amputation for example. In this new image of God-with-amputation, the phantom limb would represent a part of God that belongs to God but does not exist, turning the pure, perfect image into an apparently broken one.
 
If we allow ourselves to do this, we find moving in the direction of this Disabled God would reveal something more fundamental about the nature of the universe than the pure Being-ness God: its fundamental inevitable interdependence of being and non-being (i.e. its inevitability in contradiction of non-duality). In other words, that which we call God must not be pure existence, for pure Being would exclude non-existence, and non-existence is essential for existence to be realized. An example in the physical world is the need for the 'non-existent' void of space to make physical 'existing' objects distinguishable from one another. In this sense, a 'better' representation of God would be one we’d consider disabled, for its non-existent component would be unavoidable. And the evident brokenness of this Disabled God would be a stronger representative to enkindle life. How is this?
 
EXPOSING THE EVER-PRESENT ABSENCE:
For a person born with a missing limb (i.e. a non-existent limb), that absence of limb has the potential to be the most impactful thing in that person’s life. Notice, this 'missing' limb is not missing in the sense that it can be found and returned as we understand most missing things. It is an ever-present absence, never to be returned. Blasé Pascal spoke of the absence of a beloved while a lover waits for them in a coffee shop. To the lover waiting, their beloved’s absence (non-existence) is a presence that can, in that moment, be everything to the lover. To everyone else, the beloved’s absence means nothing. This is how non-existence can create.
 
A physical absence (as in the case of the amputated limb) is harder to ignore than an emptiness inside. It’s harder to repress, harder to cover up. So, people with disabilities such as this draw attention to a deeper truth: that lack (emptiness, non-existence, void) is an essential component of our being. In fact, it is the driving force in our lives. No matter how 'at peace' we say we are, we don’t move without a desire to move, and we don’t desire unless we lack what we desire. In other words, life is not life without desire. And desire doesn’t exist without absence.
 
Desire has been given a bad rap in many Eastern circles; presented as the source of all suffering, that which is to be eradicated to achieve enlightenment. This is true. Desire is the source of all suffering. But it is also the source of all joy. The path of elimination of desire sends the Eastern student on an endless desire to exterminate desire, like a dog chasing its own tail. The fatal flaw is in the conscious or unconscious belief that there is, once again, an attainable pure Being-ness, an endless escape from the suffering. The Western student is tricked by essentially the same flaw, that enlightenment as pure Being-ness is attainable (albeit they would likely call enlightenment something different, like Heaven or the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit or the Canon). That said, both positions are considered noble by worldly standards in their intention to eliminate suffering and drive the world forward towards some perfect Being-ness.
 
But what if the pedestal of pure Being-ness as the pinnacle of self-actualization – as God – is flawed, given it forsakes the critical mixture of existence with non-existence. What if this is why this intention often fuels the very suffering it intends to eradicate. Once again, the Disabled God can provide a better perspective here; that brokenness is fundamental, and pure Being-ness is not. The alienation felt as the mixture of being and non-being is who we are. In this sense, the Disabled God, once again, provides a better representative for us to relate to and strive for; a being at peace in its brokenness. So, how is this state achieved?
 
ACHIEVING PEACE IN BROKENNESS:
Well, both Eastern and Western have a very critical characteristic in common that assists on this journey: that is of emptying. The one correction provided by the vision of the Disabled God is the intention of emptying.
 
What is often misplaced is the goal of emptying. The goal of emptying is not to hedonistically become one with perfect Being-ness, or to achieve some power over the void inside, or to achieve some fruit of our emptying which is always a ‘better’ Being-ness. It’s not to nihilistically become the void, it’s not to eradicate oneself in order to dominate oneself. It’s simply to approach non-existence as an existing being in order to embrace it, and by embracing it, to build a better relationship with it. This is the deep knowledge in the phrase “love your enemy.” Our greatest enemy is always inside, fighting non-existence. In bringing being and non-being together in their non-togetherness we become one with the divine as a Disabled God. In this sense, if we are cursed to be a victim of the idol factory of our minds, let its production yield a Broken God, for brokenness as our example of perfection is what enlivens our form in a more fulfilling way. Love follows this pattern. In this same way, true love knows its beloved, but never fully. It always comes equipped with a component of infinite unknowability, an ever-present absence.
 
THE DESTRUCTION OF IDOLS:
And what of taking this idea radically to its end? The Disabled God can act as a step on the path to freedom in the death of God. Taking the Disabled God to its end is a path to eliminating the idol all together. At that point God then becomes the midst of love itself, a love where there is no image the lover requires the beloved to live up to. So, strive to embrace the void fully. This is the meaning of enlightenment. This is the meaning of grace. This is faith. We are disarticulated beings, severed inside. But we don’t need to be fixed. We are disabled, as the ontological source of our being is disabled. Let us use our disability to come together, to see our uniting force in brokenness together.
 
Richard Turilli is the author of HOLOGRAM HEROES. He enjoys exploring the benefits of our universal trait of brokenness on one’s path to freedom.

Also, If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL. Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

​I found you in words explained to me clearly
I found you in the conceptions I made
The idols I built in the factory of my mind
In the heaven beyond the grave
I found you as the cause, the maker of this
I called you mine,  
With breath I gave
I made you wholly exist
 
Then Anslem taught, of one greater than thought
Beyond conceiving, beyond what things I could find
A light, a wind, a wave uncaught
An absent, yet present divine
 
Like a mystic, negation purified
You lost all tangible meaning
Left was nothing but what’s inside
Enraptured in numinous screaming
 
Mind saturated in absence, reframed understanding
Transcended in a surplus of lack, demanding.
You're nothing, but I can’t deny you’re with me
This emptiness knows, it sets me free
 
But could this be just perpetual illusion
Like the deceit of men in spiritual union
A magical trick, I ignorantly awed
A counter experience in the ridding of God
 
But to whom can I ask as I ravel like thread
The anguish of choice, existential dread
It can’t be for heaven if heaven a bribe
Or to follow the lead of what other’s inscribed
 
It must be my will, yet my will’s but effect
Of the various cancers those same others inject
How do I escape this alienation
Antagonist angst, endless frustration
 
If you are the one that we do not know
Like a crack which breaks its way into the flow
 
An unknowability, a constitutive lack
The way to the depths I need to unpack
The gap to which I unappealingly yield
The voice that calls from out of left field

I was, and am still, a man wading in the passions of a stormy sea of existence. The darkness that once surrounded me was cold. The sea, raging. My struggles against it, futile. Words became saviors, paths to signify the squall of emotions roiling from the deep. They were my escape, an outlet to express and, in some way, subdue the surrounding waters. The liberation they promised was like a lighthouse, guiding me home.

But the more I followed them, the more I found they betrayed me. At first, they lured me into believing that they could, in fact, grasp the ungraspable or explain the unexplainable. They made me feel like the hole where the perfect word was to be inserted, the word that would finally articulate the situation with exactness, could be found in the dictionary of words at my disposal. They tricked me into believing the saturating event of life could be expressed in understandable terms. But as I reached out to hold onto them, they slipped through my fingers like the amorphousness of the waters. As I became frustrated and tried to strike them, they absorbed my blows with imperviousness. They contained an excess beyond themselves that had a way of overpromising yet invariably underdelivering. As I tried harder to swim towards their light, their meaning pointed away from themselves, towards other words who’s meaning did the same in a web of disillusion. It was all a contradiction, unmatched by any I’d uncovered, swirling me in a whirlpool of severance.

Nonetheless, I continued to wrestle, unrelenting, and their contradictory nature began to reveal a deep and elaborate hoax: that the whole world is like this. It promises salvation through substantiality, yet, its undercurrent is insubstantial, indescribable, unconditional. It screams the answers from the hilltops, yet its undertone is silence. It is full of charlatans, beacons on an infinite horizon, coaxing us all into swimming in one direction or another, yet, brilliantly making us believe our direction is our choice. But I realized that following the lighted promise of these commodified perfections leads only to endlessly swimming under the will of someone else’s authority.

So, what was I to do? If the choices I make are governed by societal and biological / robotic determinacy, then how is it possible to have free will? If every choice I make is a hologram, appearing real, yet only my imagination of someone else’s ideas, then what can I actually consider my choice? Who are my heroes or role models if they are all just promising an artificial solution to the hollow I feel inside? What does freedom mean at that point? To find a way to live freer from the world’s masked manipulation I needed to better understand the concept of freedom.

My conclusion: Conscious choice is never free from influence. Although it is what many of us hold as our dearest trait, it is always governed by our past and controlled by our symbolic identities. But all is not lost for freedom, because, paradoxically, we are fortunate to be broken creatures, and, as such, we are more than our easily manipulated conscious self. Emancipation is found in exactly the place that feels out of our conscious control, within our unconscious. That division I feel, disrupting the unsettled waters inside, is not contingent, it is fundamental. The core of humanity is not wholeness, it is brokenness; the dictionary does provide fairly good guidance here.
 
Human: a being susceptible to weakness.
Synonyms: flesh and blood, fallible, imperfect, vulnerable, erring, flawed
 
But there is no need for despair from this inherent internal imperfection, for the incompleteness that is suggested from imperfection provides the path to experiencing the beauty of the world and the cure for our conscious slavery. It is hidden in plain sight, in our capacity for being aware of and embracing our internal contradiction. We are severed inside, alienated from pure identity. Frustration in articulation comes from the fact that, although our conscious desire is always driven to best articulate our state, we are metaphorically, dis-articulated.
 
Disarticulation: the separation of two bones at their joint, either traumatically or by way of injury or by a surgeon during arthroplasty or amputation.
 
This separation inside us is freeing because it disrupts the determinant chain of causality. It is not influenced by the latest trends, or what everyone in our entire life has told us we should be. There is a part of us that our conscious self cannot see or influence directly, yet it insists, interrupts, decenters, traumatizes, and enters in from where no one can touch it. And it is the divide from which every concept that creates meaning in the world originates.
​
The problem is that this division feels to us like emptiness, so we become easily ashamed of it. It appears like trauma, so we are easily frightened by it. And like a phantom limb or an empty room, we feel it is missing something. We feel its lacking contents. And, in response, we translate this feeling within ourselves as dis-content, dissatisfaction, grief. So, we cannot help but want to mask this estrangement and distract ourselves from it by finding our part to play as people.
 
Person: a character in a play or story.
 
And as people, our aims so often involve dressing up for the part, hiding our antagonisms, and engaging in what the acquired amputee community knows as cosmesis.
 
Cosmesis: used to describe the outer, aesthetic covering of a prosthesis.
 
But although we must assume symbolic identities to function in the world, we should not hide the hollow parts of who we are, or deny the inherent split of our identity, for it is the emptiness between the notes which turns them into music. It is only lack itself that is free from external control. It is how things like love, justice, and truth arise – words that are free from accessible meaning, yet somehow bring meaning into the world. These are things that we cannot choose, but call to us. That’s why, as contradictory as it may sound, trying to fix my brokenness leads only to endless fix-ation, while embracing it leads to freedom.

​Things are what they are. Facts are facts. We all know this. But when a question arises about whether something is what it is we get a hint that there is something deeper at work. With animals we find it easy to rarely question their identity. Dog is dog. Lion is lion. Crow is crow. But with man, we constantly scrutinize whether each one is human or inhuman, friend or foe, divine or infernal. Yes, we agree, stones are stones, yet, beyond man, we have no problem questioning whether music is music, or art is art, or beauty is beauty. We’d consider that our “subjective” opinion. This capacity to recognize the split in identity as the inherent quality of the “subject,” that something isn’t fully what it claims to be, provides the secret of life: that to be a subject is to be divided. It is this contradictory force which drives all existence. Things actually aren’t what they are. Modern science has only supported this fact for all substances, even beyond the subject. As we dive deep into the materiality of existence, we find even stones yielding to the effects of quantum indeterminacy, whereby their particles can exist in multiple different states simultaneously. But we don’t need to go as deep as the quantum level of existence to know that I am me, only because I’m contradicted from who I am, and this contradiction is why I change. For example, if my body were to stay the same and be the exact version at 20 and 80 years old, then no one would believe I was me. At an even more fundamental level, I’m also not fully my body. We find this easily when we describe ourselves, saying “my leg” or “my arm.” If I have to say something is mine, then it’s obviously not me. There is a split that is required. We find this need for basic contradiction in every aspect of life, from a democratic government fueled by the split of ideas to enhance the synthesis of outcomes, to an evolutionary theory of biology, in which a perpetual dialectic unfolding of antagonisms in the environment is the primary power at play. So, when a coach challenges a call, know they are tapping into the most fundamental quality of existence: our contradiction.

To play one’s position is to know the bounds to which one is expected to act on the field. It is, in a very direct way, a reflection of the expectations of modernity. The Enlightenment (late 17th and 18th century) could be thought of as the foundational moment of modernity, and the moment in which the world, in the words of Immanuel Kant, “dared to think for itself.” How does positionality relate to thinking for one’s self? Well, in modernity, it became the structured way in which one thought for himself. Pre-modernity didn’t distinguish between church and state, religion and secular. Traditionally, authoritarian kings exploited religious superstitions in government to justify divine sovereign rule and oppress the masses. In modernity we begin to see the breaking of these chains through the clear distinctions of subjective vs. objective, rational vs. irrational, scientific vs. non-scientific, public vs. private, and cognitive vs. emotive. In this sense modernity was necessary for progress towards a greater freedom. But what can happen when players on the field become overly restricted by the boundaries of their position? What happens when players that are learning the game take too seriously the limits that have been described to them? They miss the point of it all. They miss the chance to make plays. Professional players know a deeper truth, that yes, first, positions are required to be defined, but they are in fact, fluid and dependent on each other. There is an undercurrent, running beneath the binary distinctions. It is not religion, religion’s position is subjective, irrational, non-scientific, private, and emotive. It is not science, science’s position is objective, rational, scientific, public, and cognitive. But it is the amorphous core which gives rise to both. They are both, in their best sense, the response to being grabbed by something unconditional. Science is not purely objective inquiry. It is not heartless, methodological, rational, disinterested calculation. Any great scientist will tell you, it begins like artistic inquiry in which the scientist becomes decentered, overcome with direction that is outside the bounds of logic. The scientist comprehends through understanding and that understanding provides meaning but he is driven by something in which he doesn’t understand, something that brings meaning into the world, but itself lacks meaning. It is the indescribable force that I unsuccessfully attempt to describe to ballplayers which comes over me the minute a ball is popped up in the field, and I must sprint with my entire being towards it with reckless abandon. In that moment, something seizes me, something lays claim to me, it is not my idea, it inbreaks upon me, it interrupts my life in a disturbing way, it puts me on the accusative, I am the receiver, I affirm it without compromise, I commit myself to it without reserve or care for my own wellbeing. It is the unconditional. It is what so many have tried to conquer through religion or discredit through science, but it will remain. For it brings life. It is an event which captivates in a way we cannot conceptualize. Like art, or music, it does not fall into rational or irrational, subjective or objective. It either moves you or it doesn’t.

​If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

When approaching a sign on the street, the first thought in one’s mind, after noticing its material shape and form, is to determine its meaning (i.e. the words that define its purpose). In a sense, "signs" and "meaning" are intertwined. For some signs, misinterpretation is so costly that its meaning is literally written on it, as is in the case of the STOP sign. This raises the question: why do we have signs? We look for signs when we want direction, or we want to give direction. Signs hold important information for the sake of order. Said another way, it’s as if we are moved to make signs when we feel something is significant enough. This is reinforced with the Latin roots of the word significance, which are signum (sign) and facare (to make). Signs in a baseball game are lower stakes versions of street signs, relaying different actions to players at various positions. No life-threatening situations will arise due to the misreading of a baseball sign, yet each sign has its clear meaning, and is expected to be followed to the letter of the law. But what happens when something’s significance is so great that it reaches the level of the indescribable? Wouldn’t that situation be closer to something best described as insignificant (i.e. unable to make into a sign)? We have a hard time labeling something so impactful as insignificant. But isn’t it far worse to lower the unconditional into a condition of significance? What if we could overcome this mental hurdle and become comfortable in the realm of the insignificant? Wouldn’t we find the meaning of life is closer to an emptiness than a substance, given insignificance lacks substance. Doesn’t infiniteness lack edges? And isn't that without edges insubstantial? So, what happens when we try to force meaning onto life? We find it insubstantial, like water, or music, or dancing. It is, in essence, a meaningless meaning. Not in the nihilistic sense of the word, but in the mystical sense, whereby we know that material conditions exist but spiritual unconditionality is essential.
​
If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com