The Unbearable Vividness of What Is: Beyond the Philosophy of Absurdism

We often find ourselves trapped in a tireless search for depth, weary of a world that feels increasingly superficial and loud. We look for a way out, a transformation, or a spiritual achievement that will finally make sense of the noise. But who is it that is looking? And what is it we think we are looking for? When we talk about the totality of being, we enter a zone where language naturally short-circuits. We try to name the infinite, but the moment we define it, we have already limited it. A definition is the opposite of the infinite; it is a boundary, a finish line. Yet the absolute has no shape, no end, and no beginning. It is the very space in which every form appears and disappears. The mind is a magnificent tool for navigating the world of objects, for calculating how to get from point A to point B, or for managing the logistics of a body-mind. However, it has a habit of staying turned on even when it is not needed. It creates a secondary world, an imaginary layer of "how things should be," and then compares it to the only reality that actually exists. This gap between the mind’s story and the raw vividness of the present is where our suffering is born. We are stuck in traffic and we imagine a world where the road is clear. We return home to a partner in a bad mood and we imagine a world where they are smiling. By valuing the imaginary world over the real one, we disqualify the only thing that is actually happening. This is where a certain **philosophy of absurdism** might suggest that life is a conflict between our search for meaning and the "silent" the absolute, but in truth, there is no conflict because there is no separate self to be at odds with the totality. Consider the ocean and its waves. We see the waves—our experiences, our perceptions, our pains, and our joys—and we think they are separate entities. We might even believe that a wave needs to find a way to "rejoin" the ocean. But the wave is not an entity; it is an activity of the sea. It is the sea "waving." When the concepts of wave and sea collapse, what remains is simply water. This water is the absolute. It is not something far away or a destination to be reached through years of effort. It is so close, so fundamentally what we are, that we cannot see it as an object. It is the light that allows us to be conscious of anything at all. There is a wild vitality in this moment that the mind finds too simple to grasp. The mind seeks complexity; it wants a mountain to climb, a series of trials to overcome, and a story of progress to tell itself. It wants to "become" enlightened. But there is no journey. There is no "there" that is not already "here." When we say that things are just as they are, the mind becomes unemployed. It loses its grip because there is no problem to solve and no goal to achieve. This is not a lack of existence, but a freedom from the binary of existing and not existing.