I Looked And I Did Not Find Anything

THE FLOOR IS YOURS AGAIN. Part One’s objector said the problems were real, and was right. Part Two’s objector has a different complaint, and it is just as serious, and it deserves the same unflinching treatment. Say it.

Fine. I did them. The experiments. I looked behind my eyes and found pressure and some warmth. I waited at the mouse hole and caught nothing. I asked myself if I was aware and, yes, obviously, I am aware, and then the timer ran out and I went back to my life. If something profound was supposed to happen, it did not. No shift, no opening, no quiet revolution. I found nothing. So either I am doing it wrong, or this works for other people and not for me, or the whole thing is a very well written nothing.

Read your own report back, slowly, because you have just described success and filed it under failure. I looked for the sufferer and found pressure and some warmth. That is not a missed discovery. That is the discovery. The search was for the solid, separate me that your entire suffering has been organized around, and the search came back with pressure and some warmth and no me, which is exactly what chapter six said it would come back with. What did you expect finding no thing to feel like? Fireworks announce arrivals. This is a departure, or rather the noticing that something you had been defending your whole life was never on the premises. Of course it feels like nothing. It is the discovery that a particular nothing has been running everything, and the flavor of that discovery is not thunder. It is a small, dry, almost administrative huh. If you got the huh, even faintly, even once, the experiment worked. You were listening for an explosion and the finding was a silence, and you walked right past it because nobody had told you what caliber of quiet to expect.

But something is supposed to happen eventually, or this book has no reason to exist. And things do happen to people. The lightning bolt. The morning everything changed. Whole books get written by people who fell through the floor of themselves. If the looking is real, where is mine?

An honest answer, in two parts. First, yes, dramatic openings happen, and second, the literature over reports them, for the same reason the news over reports plane crashes. Lightning makes better copy than drizzle. Nobody writes a memoir called I Gradually Argued With Reality Somewhat Less, and yet that book, if it existed, would describe the actual path of nearly everyone who ever took this seriously. The real progress is cumulative and mostly invisible, and it hides in a place you would never think to look: in things that do not happen. The Sunday dread that got met in the body and moved through by seven instead of poisoning the whole evening. The replay that ran twice instead of forty times. The sentence that arrived, the old famous one, and got seen, half a second in, as a sentence, and the evening that consequently did not change color. You cannot notice the argument you did not have, any more than you notice the headache you did not get. So the measure was never how do I feel, which is a weather question. The measure is what got caught. Did a should announce itself as a should this week? Did a label pause for even a second before sticking? Then it is working, and it was never going to feel like lightning, because subtraction has no voltage.

Or, and I say this with respect, maybe it is all suggestion. You tell me I will not find a self, and lo, I do not find one. You tell me the sensation is bearable, and I obediently report it bearable. You have been seeding conclusions for two hundred pages and then congratulating me for reaching them. How is any of this different from a stage hypnotist?

This is the best objection in the book so far, and it has a clean answer, so stay with it. The difference between a suggestion and an instruction is what happens when a hostile person follows it. A suggestion needs your cooperation. It works only on the willing, and it collapses under adversarial testing, which is why the hypnotist screens his volunteers. An instruction does not care how you feel about it. Hostile chemists get the same reaction as devout ones. So run the searches as a hostile chemist. Go find the self, genuinely intending to produce it and slap it on the table and refute chapter six. Set out to locate one second of raw sensation that is actually unbearable, this second of it, forecast removed. Sit at the mouse hole determined to catch the composer at work. The book gains nothing if you nod along, because nodding is filing, and chapter five spent its whole length on what filing is worth. It only gains if you check, and checking is precisely the thing suggestion cannot survive. And one more turn of it, since the objection cuts both ways. Ask where the original idea came from, the one that says there is a solid me in here that life is happening to. You did not check that one either. It was installed early, by everyone, before you could inspect it, repeated ten thousand times a year for a lifetime, and it is the single most suggested idea you have ever received. This book is not planting a belief in your head. It is pointing at one that was planted, and handing you the shovel, and if you dig and find the old belief was true after all, keep it, with the book’s blessing. It just wants the digging to happen once before you die.

Then take the opposite complaint, because it is mine. I did find it. I looked behind my eyes and I found me, obviously, the one doing the looking, the one who is here right now, and I am not going to be talked out of something this plain by a clever sequence of questions. Your search feels like a word game, engineered so that whatever I hold up, you can say that is an object, next. Of course I cannot find the finder by looking for it. That does not mean it is not there. It means you built a search that cannot succeed.

Good. Hold on to that, because you are standing much closer to chapter nine than the agreeable reader is.

Concede the first part at once. Yes, the finder cannot appear among the things found. Yes, that is structural. And no, it is not a trick, for the same reason the eye does not appear in the room. If the conclusion of chapter six were therefore you do not exist, the objection would be fatal, and the book would deserve to lose the argument.

But go back and read the rule that stands over the whole search. Nobody is being told they do not exist. Something is obviously here. The book agrees with you, completely, without reservation, and it agrees so completely that it hands the entire ninth chapter over to it. The disagreement was never about whether. It is about what.

So take the thing you found, this plain, undeniable, here-ness, and put two questions to it, honestly. Where does it end? And what is it made of?

Go looking for its edges and you will not find any. Go looking for its substance and you will find only whatever it happens to be knowing at the time. That is not a defeat and it is not a word game. It simply means it is not a thing, and things are what have edges. And the little walled off owner that your suffering has been organized around was always described as a thing: located, bounded, separate, sitting in here while life happened over there, taking the blows. That is the item the search does not turn up. Not you. The wall.

Last one. Suppose I grant all of it. The searches, the knowing, the home that was never far. I wake up tomorrow and the mortgage is still the mortgage, my knee still hurts, my mother is still my mother, and the world is still on fire. Wednesday does not care about Part Two. What difference does any of this actually make when the alarm goes off?

None, if it stays in the chair. That is not a concession, it is the thesis of the entire remaining third of this book, so notice that your objection and the table of contents have just agreed with each other. Nobody stops suffering in a chair, and a peace that dissolves on contact with a kitchen was scenery, and chapter three already had a word for scenery. The honest promise for Wednesday is specific, and smaller than transformation, and bigger than it sounds. The knee will still hurt, and the hurt will get room instead of a lawsuit. The mortgage will still be due, and it will be paid by the hands, which were always the ones paying it, minus the surcharge that never lowered the balance. Your mother will still be your mother, and the phone call will still be the phone call, and somewhere in the middle of it a familiar sentence will arrive, and this time there is a small chance, growing monthly, that it gets seen instead of believed. That is the difference on offer. Not a new Wednesday. The same Wednesday, un-argued-with, which turns out to be a different thing to live through. Whether that holds, and what happens when it does not, and what it has to say to grief and to other people and to a sink full of dishes, is Part Three, which starts now, and which is the only part of this book that your Wednesday will ever actually meet.

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