Being

In your moment of sinking into the whirlpool of desire, collapsing inward beyond escape

Scripture

The sand-bed is collapsing; the flesh devours its own flesh.

Void to the extreme, bottomless; an empty belly is drawing in.

The more you struggle the deeper you wedge; the more you straighten the more you wrinkle.

Being is sinking, is deepening; being is resisting, is submerging.

Not drowning, not imprisonment—the earth is chewing its cud.

Wenzi · On Being

The ground beneath your feet has suddenly gone empty. Not a fall—a spinning suction downward. You were standing on a seemingly solid sandbank; in an instant, the sand-bed collapses (the sand-bed is collapsing), forming an inward-spinning funnel. The more you struggle, the deeper you sink; the sand twines your legs like a living thing, swallowing your waist. Worse, you feel an inner, self-devouring hunger (the flesh devours its own flesh). A void, bottomless empty belly is generating suction from inside you (void to the extreme, bottomless; an empty belly is drawing in).

“The more you struggle the deeper you wedge; the more you straighten the more you wrinkle.” You struggle, and your body wedges deeper (the more you struggle the deeper you wedge). You straighten up to resist, but your skin is twisted into deep folds like cloth (the more you straighten the more you wrinkle). You are amid “sinking” and “deepening,” “resisting” and “submerging” (being is sinking, is deepening; being is resisting, is submerging). Every effort accelerates your fall.

“Not drowning, not imprisonment—the earth is chewing its cud.” The scripture gives a chilling reading: this is not drowning or imprisonment (not drowning, not imprisonment). The earth is “chewing its cud” (the earth is chewing its cud). It is swallowing you, digesting you, in order to extract from you something it needs. You have become the swallowed nourishment.

Now, stop all outward struggling.

Because the fuel of struggling is the whirlpool itself.

Shift your whole attention, by force, from the panic of “I must get out” to the feeling of the “inner empty belly.”

Go and gaze at that empty belly. Let it swallow your thought of “wanting to flee,” swallow your emotion of “fear.” See: when it has swallowed everything, what remains? Is it that very gaze which is “gazing at the empty belly”?

Do not fill it with thought—only be aware of its existence, its shape, its suction. When you face that inner empty belly completely, a paradox happens: the whirlpool swallowing you begins to resonate with the empty belly inside you. The whirlpool’s spinning becomes, as it were, the pulse of the empty belly itself. You are not being swallowed by outer quicksand—the empty belly inside you is attracting and creating the outer whirlpool. And so the speed of sinking… slows. Not because the quicksand stops, but because the boundary between you and the quicksand blurs. You become part of the quicksand, become that spinning itself. The collapse continues, but its direction has changed. It is no longer only downward destruction—it has become a centripetal, extreme condensation. You are not the slave of desire—you are that blazing, dark core by which desire forms and at last consumes itself. Being-Whirlpool: you are not the one sinking—you are that extreme inward collapse which the whirlpool must undergo in order to find its absolutely still center.