In this incantation, I envision my awakening as a massive, multi-barbed hook embedded within me, each barb a valued experience—whether pleasure or pain. Every thought, memory, desire, and sensation tightens my bond with this hook, making it indistinguishable from my being. My reality is a dense knot of self-folded tissue, where every movement, internal or external, deepens my entanglement. Yet, in recognizing this, I glimpse a path to release. By embracing featurelessness—stripping away the textures of thought and experience—I can soften the barbs, easing the relentless grip of my own entanglement.
I imagine driving a massive hook into my flesh, its surface bristling with countless tiny barbs, each one shaped like the twisting roots of a thorned vine. As the hook buries itself deeper, these minuscule, razor-sharp spines latch onto my tissue, not just piercing but curling inward, anchoring themselves like grasping fingers. Every movement tugs them further in, the pain sharpening as they burrow, ensuring that any attempt to pull the hook free would rip me apart from the inside. My body resists at first, the raw wound pulsing with agony, but then it adapts. My tissue begins to grow around the invading metal, weaving itself between the barbs, gripping them as if they were always meant to be there. Over time, my flesh hardens, solidifying the hook’s place within me, making it not just an object embedded in my body, but a part of it—one that cannot be removed without leaving me irreversibly torn.
That is what my awakening is. A great story in the shape of a multi-barbed hook embedded deep within my own flesh. Each barb is something I value enough to experience it. That value can be positive or negative; it does not matter. If I experience it in thought, sight, desire, sensation, or any other way, then it is part of my illness. Every memory I retain is a barb. Every desire I harbor is a barb. Every relationship I maintain is a barb. Every movement I make is a barb. Every love and every hatred, every opinion and every preference is a barb. My very desire to survive and thrive is a barb. My desire to throw a grand party for my favorite characters is a barb. My desire to follow the news and the news itself are barbs.
And while some of these barbs are pleasurable and others painful, all of them have the effect of attaching me to the experience of awakening. While I endlessly classify, define, characterize, and distinguish every feature of my experience, all of them are offshoots from the same hook: my illness itself. Every word, thought, concept, physical and mental movement, preference, relationship, physical and mental form, color, sensation, emotion, sound, sight, feeling, and desire is a barb in the same hook embedded into my flesh and hardened into this experience I call my awakening. The computer I type on and the cup from which I drink my morning coffee are one and the same. The distant memory of a school I once attended and the comforter on my bed right now: all part of the same formation. My “experience” is the texture of this hook; the shape it takes throughout my awakening, from the sensations of my warm blankets and my bed when I wake up, the hot coffee I sip, the chair I sit in, the thoughts I have and desires I feel, the goals that keep me working, and all the people I interact with. They are not different things just because they have separate words and I experience them in different regions of my awakening. They are textures upon textures, formations within folds of my own tissue painfully folded in upon itself. The hook is my own tissue, folding in and upon itself, piercing itself with every new feature. Every word, concept, mental and physical formation is a new barb in the growth.
What is the hook? The hook is a malignant, cancerous growth of the tissue of my own being. My awakening, in all of its myriad shapes, is my own self twisted and folded in on itself into all the shapes of my inner and outer experience. My awakening is therefore a great and torturous knot that I experience as the period between waking up and going back to sleep, chained together as life. The more I move mentally or physically, the deeper I dive into the subsurface. If there is any sort of texture in my moment, then I am moving. It doesn’t have to be just physically, it can be mentally as well. Right now I am working on my computer — the texture of my inner surface (the “external world”) is changing, as is the accompanying outer surface (my internal thoughts and plans). All these textural changes mean that I am moving, storytelling. And I can either be digging deeper in, or relaxing and softening the barbed hook.
This explains why orderly featurelessness feels so good; because it is the relaxation of my disorder. By creating a featureless awakening devoid of character both inwardly and outwardly, I alleviate the pain caused by the various barbs shifting within my flesh. Featurelessness relaxes the knots of my awakening so I can remove the hook.
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