Open Enlightenment

Satori in Paris: An inspirational interview with Martin Kovan

If you really want to know what enlightenment means for us in a very real human way, a profound expression of what the ‘enlightened life’ looks like can be found in the recent Being Ordinary podcast: Satori in Paris, where Mike Kewley interviews the Buddhist activist Martin Kovan. It’s the perfect antidote to the current vogue of spiritual blindness, paralysis [1] and navel-gazing confusion [2] endemic within the current enlightenment zeitgeist, and perhaps one of the clearest articulations of how the enlightened rubber meets the road that I’ve ever come across. I sincerely hope this podcast is circulated far and wide. It’s nothing short of inspirational.

[1] The comments to Rev. Danny Fisher’s article Top Seven Challenges of Western Socially Engaged Buddhism, show just how the popular Buddhist scene prefers political paralysis over actual compassionate action.

[2] Such as this recent tweet from Adyashanti: ‘there is no compassion, kindness and whatever else the ego is trying to pull here.. all motivation to “help” others can only be selfish.’ It’s nothing short of embarrassing.

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Evil, Be Thou My Good

There’s emptiness, and there’s the experience of emptiness.

In what follows it’s important to recognise this difference.

Emptiness itself is beyond experience, whereas the experience of emptiness – of course – is not. But even the experience of emptiness verges upon the ineffable. ‘Non-dual awareness’ is a common description of it, as is the sensation of there being ‘nothing to do, ‘nowhere to be’, and so on. The experience of emptiness is also described as realising or being in the presence of ‘God’, and it’s here, perhaps, that we see most clearly the danger of confusing the experience of the absolute with ideas or with visions of it, although these may indeed also arise at times within consciousness.

Judas: 'Why am I the odd one out?' Christ: 'These halos are a visual metaphor, Judas. Get a clue!' (Simon Ushakov, 'Last Supper', 1685)

The halos around the heads of saints in religious paintings, for example, are a visual or experiential dramatisation of a human being’s experience of emptiness. But on a literal level a halo simply looks bizarre, because it’s pointing to something that from the perspective of everyday consciousness makes no sense.

Feelings accompanying the experience of emptiness often include a sense of paradox that reaches into the very depths of being; or a feeling of ultimate freedom and release; or a sensation of infinite goodness and perfection. But what I want to explore are occasions on which I’ve experienced something very different.

This has arisen only twice – so far. The first time was at third path. At third path the experience of emptiness in real time becomes established for the first time, so I’d be surprised if anyone stumbled across it any earlier. (Although I’ve been involved in this game long enough to appreciate that it shouldn’t be entirely ruled out!)

As I sat one day, emptiness flipped from the realisation of perfection into its opposite. Instead of completeness there was utter lack. Instead of being with God, I was at the furthest point distant from Him. Existence became a curse and the mere feeling of being alive the cruellest imaginable torture, visited equally on all creatures.

This, of course, was the experience of emptiness. I could see that emptiness itself was still the same – i.e. empty. If it hadn’t been the same, then something about it would have changed, and if a ‘something’ was involved then that wasn’t emptiness. So the problem, I assumed, lay somewhere in me.

But the second time it happened was at fourth path, and consequently this has proved much harder to explain.

If we use The Heart Sutra to describe the difference between third path and fourth, then at third path we see ‘form is emptiness’. In other words, we look for phenomena and discover we cannot find them, because – we have realised – they lack any intrinsic self. At fourth path, however, we realise that ‘emptiness is form’. At third, we failed to find any intrinsic being, yet we still assumed a solid centre-point from which to launch our investigation. We started with the assumption that there is ‘form’ that can be empty. At fourth path, this is seen through. Because we now see that there is not even a self that can realise ‘form is emptiness’, suddenly the opposite proposition is the only one that makes any sense: ‘emptiness is form’. In other words, because emptiness has invaded everything (although it was always there from the beginning, of course) emptiness is now our only possible starting point, and from it everything that appears proceeds.

So when, sitting more recently, I saw again how human existence is the furthest possible distance from God; recognised being, once more, as ultimate cruelty; and witnessed reality in its true guise as an utter bag of turds, it was now with a fuller realisation that, actually, this isn’t really a problem.

I don’t mean that this stopped me from feeling like my guts were dropping through the floor, but only that I could see there were never any guts to drop through the floor in the first place – which, if anything, only compounded my view that the universe really was a pile of shit.

Why should we assume that the experience of emptiness is always ‘white light and perfection’? Well, most of the time it is, and there are good reasons for assuming that it should be so. Proclus, in his Elements of Theology, proposes:

If… all beings desire The Good how is it possible that there should be any thing prior to this cause? For if they also desire that which is prior to The Good, how can they specially desire The Good? But if they do not desire it, how is it possible that they should not desire the cause of all, since they proceed from it? If therefore The Good is that on which all beings depend, The Good is the Principle and First Cause of all things. (Proclus: Proposition 7)

In other words, emptiness and ultimate goodness are one and the same. The Good, by definition, is what all things desire, because even if we desire something we know is bad or that proves to be bad, by definition we desire it because it is better in some respect, even if it’s only in the sense that it can do more harm. Examine what’s behind any desire and ultimately the examination points to a desire for the end of desire itself. This entails the surrender of the self into emptiness, into the absolute, or (as Proclus calls it) ‘The One’. Here, in the realisation of emptiness or The One, there is no longer any desire for the Good, because there is only the Good itself.

Emptiness, therefore, is the Good.

In addition, Proclus has this to say:

Hence those things which in a certain way or respect fall off from The Good, at the same time lose the participation of The One. And those things which become destitute of The One, being filled with separation, are equally deprived of The Good. Goodness therefore is union, and union is goodness, and The Good itself is one, and The One is that which is primarily Good. (Proclus: Proposition 13)

So I’m left puzzled by my experience. Proclus seems to be saying here that we fall off from Goodness only to the extent that we fall off from The One. In other words, you can’t have emptiness without Goodness. Yet that’s exactly what I did have! Everything was the worst it could be, yet at the same time it was perfectly bad, perfectly evil, and my own deplorable condition was simply an inseparable aspect of the universal corruption.

All that you ever wanted to know about everything, were too afraid to ask, but probably suspected anyway.

Despite rumours to the contrary, arahats are still subject to the cycle of insight (Ingram 2008: 316), so I’m tempted to conclude that these kinds of experiences are simply ‘dark night’ territory in a post-enlightenment style. Whether the experience is of perfect goodness or of perfect evil, it participates in the absolute only in its ‘perfect’ aspect. The rest is, in a sense, irrelevant.

On the Kabbalistic Tree of Life the bottom-most sphere of creation is known as Malkuth, which means ‘The Kingdom’ and represents the everyday physical world. Its position at the very bottom indicates its status as the end-point and summation of creation, yet it is also at the furthest possible remove from God.

Whichever view is afforded to you of the universe possibly doesn’t matter: it is ultimate evil and the most elaborate expression of the Divine. In either case, both descriptions point to the same place.

References

Daniel M. Ingram (2008). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. London: Aeon Books.

Proclus, Elements of Theology.

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Doubting Thomas

Hearing that I’d set myself the goal of enlightenment, someone quipped: What if you get enlightened and then realise you don’t like it?

At the time I thought this was stupid. Now, I’m not so sure.

It was March 2009 when I broke through into fourth path – or ‘full’ enlightenment, according to the Therevada model. Beforehand, I could see emptiness pretty much constantly, but it seemed to occupy a particular region in the field of awareness; ‘it’ and ‘me’ appeared distinct. On the commencement of fourth path, this sense of separation collapsed. Emptiness expanded within awareness to include self. In every direction I discovered emptiness. ‘Inwards’ was just another direction; there was no longer anything special about what appeared to be ‘internal’ sensations.

At first it was difficult to put a finger on quite what had happened. Enlightenment is not an act of will – it happens regardless – so with it comes no implicit realisation of what it is. Enlightenment isn’t like putting a hat on your head; it’s like having a hat drop on you. You feel it and wonder: ‘Hey! What the fuck is this?’

Most immediately, enlightenment presented itself as having nothing to do with any of the practices I’d been engaged in. The idea that meditation – or any activity whatsoever – had any bearing upon it was laughable. So this was how I spent the first few days, walking around, seeing emptiness everywhere and realising there was nothing to do and nowhere to go because ‘just this’ was ‘it’ all along.

Alan had been there a couple of weeks already. ‘Now try some Ramana Maharshi self-inquiry,’ he suggested. ‘It’s mental!’

I took his advice and recoiled from the profound shock of it. When I asked ‘Who am I?’ formerly the answer was always in the shape of an idea or sensation. But now the answer was crystal clear and returned in the form of an experience: emptiness. That ‘thing’ beyond awareness, which was neither an idea, sensation, feeling, thought or perception, which was infinite, eternal, changeless and unconditioned – well, that was ‘me’. And I could see also how this realisation of ‘I am that‘ is available right now to everyone on the planet.

But this is where the warm and fuzzy part of the story ends, because the past six months have been more of a struggle than I ever expected. That quip about ‘what if you get enlightened and discover you don’t like it?’ has returned to haunt me.

Here are some words describing how I’ve felt since that big special moment back in March: doubtful, depressed, frustrated and pissed off.

‘You can’t be enlightened, then,’ is the obvious rejoinder, in which case I point the reader back to what I’ve written above. None of that recognition of emptiness in all things has ever gone away or faded since the moment it first reared up. Abiding non-dual awareness has taken up home in me and seems resolved to stay. It’s unaffected by anything I do or not do. If I’m happy, I see it; but so too if I’m miserable, bored, being stupid or acting like a git. Becoming kinder or happier, therefore, does not depend on my gaining some supposed ‘deeper insight’ into the nature of reality. How can you go ‘deeper’ into something than realising it doesn’t exist? Being kinder and happier depends simply on practising those behaviours.

It’s doubt that has been my biggest tormentor. The commentator in my head continues to insist: ‘This can’t be real. This can’t be it. You’re going to lose it, aren’t you? Is it still there? Go on, check! You’re deluding yourself.’

But every time I check I see the same. Yet this constant checking fails to abate the need to check again and test and console myself with the proof of it, which is then immediately doubted all over again.

It’s stupid. I see it clearly, but that doesn’t prevent it from happening. It reminds me of the friend of a friend who was diagnosed as schizophrenic: ‘I know the voices aren’t real,’ this person reportedly said, ‘but it doesn’t stop me hearing them.’

I don’t have schizophrenia; just an acute case of karma. When I meditate now, the focus has shifted slightly from the nature of stuff arising to its nature as arising stuff. It comes, persists, insists, impermanent, without essence and unsatisfactory, but it arises nevertheless – according to some configuration that lies far beyond my personal awareness.

We generally label this unacknowledged configuration in the way our thoughts and impulses arise with the word ‘habit’. I never dreamed that one of the main lessons of enlightenment is how deep and intractable the grip of habit is upon our lives.

Habit is empty, of course. It’s not a thing in itself but, like everything, phenomena created from a circumstantial pattern of other phenomena, passing itself off as something distinct. But habit doesn’t need to be absolute (impossible, naturally) in order to exercise an iron grip; it’s the position where it sits that gives it its power. In the realm of the senses, whatever presents to awareness comes via the sense organs. Analogously, in the realm of the mind, arising thoughts and ideas seem first to have been filtered through a layer of habit.

Looking back across my life and considering the habits of thought I’ve acquired from education and experience, it’s clear that doubt and negativity have always been my trusty friends.

I test ideas by attacking them and doing my best to rip them down until there’s nothing standing. If anything remains, then I take this as a sign it might be true. It’s my rule not to take on trust anything I haven’t first tried to tear apart.

This hasn’t been an intellectual choice. (I doubt that such a thing is possible.) Early upbringing and character have determined how I approach ideas. I’ve never adopted a philosophy that I haven’t seen through and grew sick of in time. This has led to dark episodes of disillusionment and confusion – but I don’t altogether regret them. I couldn’t have arrived at the insights I’ve accumulated without this attitude, for the good reason that I’ve never spared myself or my own experience from this same urge to tear things apart.

Skepticism gets things done. Negation is probably our most powerful intellectual tool. Think, for instance, of how vipassana depends upon rejecting every single notion or idea and proceeding on the basis of immediate experience alone. Or think of how the conceptualisation of God, the Absolute, only gets anywhere when approached in the apophatic mode – i.e. in purely negative terms.

The Vimuttimagga categorises people into three basic types: the walker in passion, the walker in hate, and the walker in infatuation. My type, the one that ‘is given to fault-finding’ and ‘does not cleave (to what is good)’ (p. 56) is the walker in hate.

Each type works toward self-realisation at a particular speed and finds the going more or less difficult. The walker in passion gets there quickly, because he or she is accepting, intent on good and faithful to their ideals. Well, good for him! Yet, surprisingly, the walker in hate gets there quickly too, because ‘hate and intelligence are alike owing to three traits: non-clinging, searching for faults, repulsion’ (p. 56).

Being of a destructive cast of mind is helpful on the path to enlightenment. But – as I’ve realised – those same habits may not prove so helpful afterwards, because you cannot tear down emptiness. When emptiness is apparent in everything, the capacity to negate is pointless, self-contradictory. And equally, you cannot doubt the absolute; doubt is relative when set against the absolute, and is rendered futile.

Yet my habits of a life-time are not going to vanish overnight. Especially not when they’ve proved so helpful and successful in the past.

The Incredulity of Thomas (Caravaggio).

I take consolation in the story of St. Thomas, the one who doubted the resurrection until he’d personally seen the risen Christ and stuck his fingers in Christ’s wounds. ‘Do you believe because you see me?’ says Christ to Thomas. ‘How happy are those who believe without seeing me!’ (John 20: 29).

Exoteric Christianity is big on the notion of belief, so it’s easy to read this as Jesus admonishing Thomas for his lack of faith. But I think Christ is simply pointing out that Thomas might be less miserable if he didn’t keep constantly testing the fuck out of everything.

The risen body of Christ is not an animated corpse, but a metaphor for the body post-enlightenment. (The dharmakaya, it’s called in Buddhism.) To stick your fingers in the wounds of Christ is the pointless attempt to probe or grasp at absolute emptiness with the relative mind. Is it still there? Is it truly real? Is He truly resurrected? These are futile attempts to establish a proof beyond that which is proof already.

Indeed, happy are those not stupid enough for this!

Reference

Upatissa (1995). Vimuttimagga (‘The Path of Freedom’), trans. Rev. N.R.M. Ehara, Soma Thera, Kheminda Thera. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.

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The Dialogue of Eris and Angelos (Part 2)

ANGELOS: What would you like to drink, Eris? I’d suggest something highly caffeinated, because if we continue to pursue the themes we’ve explored so far I’ve a feeling things might get very deep.

ERIS: In that case, Angelos, mine’s a mocha – with extra chocolate. I’ll need a heavy dose of pleasure if you’re going to get mystical on me. Let’s sit over here, at the back, where there’s less chance anyone who knows me might overhear us discussing your spooky trash.

ANGELOS: ‘Spooky trash’? So I’m guessing you’d reject out of hand the idea that there exists something Absolute?

ERIS: Yes. Because it’s impossible. A thing that I experience is defined in some way, so the fact that it’s not an absolute is what makes each thing itself.

ANGELOS: You’d assert that the Absolute does not exist?

ERIS: Yes. Or if it could be said to exist, it would have no relevance to my experience.

ANGELOS: Therefore the Absolute is that which does not exist?

ERIS: Hey, I don’t like the sound of this. I’m not too happy about that ‘is’…

ANGELOS: But would you agree that all things that exist do so in a manner that is distinct, each from the other, and this is what enables us to tell them apart?

ERIS: Of course.

ANGELOS: And that which does not exist does so in a manner which is identical to all other things that do not exist, and it’s this which enables us to distinguish between things that do exist and all those that don’t?

ERIS: No. Because things can ‘not exist’ differently. For instance: dinosaurs do not currently exist, but they once did. Unicorns, on the other hand, never have.

ANGELOS: Agreed. But I’d like to keep our discussion focused on our experience. I want to talk about things existing and not existing according to how they arise within our awareness. Can you go along with me on this?

ERIS: Fine, because what doesn’t exist can’t arise in my awareness. How could it? This is going to be a very short discussion and I’ve hardly sipped my mocha yet.

ANGELOS: Hang on a moment! Although unicorns and dinosaurs can’t arise in our experience, you were able to talk about them just now.

ERIS: Of course, because we have signs in our language with which to do so.

ANGELOS: So when you talk about things not existing in different ways, what you’re really talking about is a difference among types of signs. You’re referring to a difference among things that do exist – the signs. But as far as our experience is concerned, unicorns and dinsosaurs are both absent from it in an identical fashion.

ERIS: Well, yes, I suppose so. I still don’t see how this helps your argument, because now you’re admitting that our awareness is defined and limited by our language.

ANGELOS: Only if we choose to limit ourselves to the realm of thoughts and ideas, Eris. The point I was hoping to make is simply that all things that don’t exist manifest their non-existence in the same way – by not being available to experience – whereas all things that do exist manifest uniquely.

ERIS: I’m not sure that ‘manifesting non-existence’ makes much sense, but I would provisionally accept that.

ANGELOS: I don’t like putting it that way either. All I mean is that what doesn’t exist isn’t apparent to our mind and senses except as a sign or idea (which is a representative, not the thing itself) and that this goes for all things that don’t exist. Whereas all things that do exist are apparent, and are all apparently different.

ERIS: Okay. So what? All you’ve done is to echo my assertion that no absolute exists, and nothing that does not exist is available to our experience.

ANGELOS: You’re right. But I want to look at it now from the converse. Namely: that which does not exist, because all things are non-existent in the same way, is therefore intrinsically consistent and whole. And also, that which does not exist does so unchangingly and for all time.

ERIS: Unless it comes into existence at some point in the future.

ANGELOS: You mean that a conception of something non-existent that we once had may at a later time become a reality?

ERIS: Why not?

ANGELOS: Granted. But is our conception identical to the thing that later comes into being?

ERIS: No. It’s not the actual thing, but we’re able to identify it as such.

ANGELOS: So, again, we have to be careful to distinguish between our ideas and thoughts, which exist, and the things of which they are the representatives, which may not exist. As far as our personal awareness is concerned, isn’t it the case that something that does not exist for us will continue not to do so uniformly and for all time?

ERIS: I suppose so. But if it doesn’t exist, forgive me if I don’t make much of a fuss about it!

ANGELOS: Even though it is whole, consistent, and eternally unchanging? Even though that which doesn’t exist fits the criteria of something Absolute which, at the beginning, you said you couldn’t conceive?

ERIS: But what’s the point? It still doesn’t exist, so therefore I’m still unable to experience it – except in the sphere of ideas and language, which – God knows why – you’ve ruled out of our discussion. Yet you still seem happy to go on chatting, and if this discussion isn’t an example of a purely linguistic exercise then I don’t know what is!

ANGELOS: Well, firstly you said you couldn’t conceive of an Absolute, and yet by talking about the nature of that which does not exist we’ve arrived at precisely such a concept.

ERIS: Yet the concept is not the thing – as you yourself admitted.

ANGELOS: Agreed. So what we need to do next is to examine whether that which does not exist can nevertheless enter experience.

ERIS: I can’t wait to hear this! Come on, then.

ANGELOS: Have you ever come across the so-called ‘pointing-out instructions’? They’re derived from eastern religions and are traditionally used for demonstrating to people that the self doesn’t exist.

ERIS: Yes, I’ve read about those. The instructions take you through awareness of every part of the body and you ask yourself: ‘Am I this finger? Am I these eyes?’, and so on.

ANGELOS: That’s one form of it. But you can ask the same question of anything that arises in your experience: ‘Am I these perceptions? These thoughts? This mind?’ What soon becomes apparent is that there is nothing corresponding to a ‘self’ anywhere in our experience. If you’re aware of something, that thing can’t be the thing that has the awareness – it cannot be you. Even the mind that you’re aware of having – it can’t be the same mind that has an awareness of ‘you’. So what is this ‘you’?

ERIS: I’ve done this exercise. If you continue with it for long enough it can make you feel really weird. But something is wrong there, obviously, because even though it ‘logically’ proves there’s no self, I can still feel one. The self must be some kind of deep structure or pattern in the brain; something that’s not available to experience but is constantly there nonetheless.

ANGELOS: The self is unconscious, in other words?

ERIS: Yes.

ANGELOS: But you’re conscious, aren’t you?

ERIS: So it seems, although there are philosophers around these days who deny that it’s so simple.

ANGELOS: So if Eris’s ‘self’ is unconscious, but Eris is conscious, then Eris and herself are unalike.

ERIS: Consciousness is the greatest mystery of modern science. If I knew the answer do you think I’d be sitting here with you?

ANGELOS: What if the logic of the pointing-out instructions were correct and ‘modern science’ were asking the wrong questions? What if the self truly doesn’t exist, as seems to be the case when we take the time to investigate?

ERIS: Why does my experience tell me it does, then?

ANGELOS: If we experience a self, yet the investigation of it reveals it cannot exist, then your earlier argument that we cannot experience what does not exist is simply an assumption. Each time we experience the self we are actually experiencing something that cannot exist.

ERIS: Not necessarily. It could be just a misperception.

ANGELOS: Misperception is when one thing that is known is mistaken for another. A rook is mistaken for a crow, perhaps, or a pattern in the bark of a tree is taken for a face. But in our case, what is this self that we have mistaken for some other thing?

ERIS: It’s… – I don’t know! It’s just the self; it’s self-evident!

ANGELOS: My point is that it can’t be said we’re ‘misperceiving’ something if we can’t even state what that thing is we suppose is being misperceived.

ERIS: None of this is new to me, Angelos. I know that if we look deep into the nature of anything we find that our grounds for supposing it to exist are baseless. This is called deconstructionism and, on this point at least, modern philosophy and the Eastern traditions have much in common.

ANGELOS: I know the sort of philosophers you mean, Eris. If they have so much in common with Buddhism – as you suggest – and if they’ve realised that nothing possesses intrinsic being, do these philosophers declare themselves enlightened, like the Buddha did?

ERIS: Certainly not! That would be a claim of absolute truth, whereas our contemporary philosophers have demonstrated there’s no such thing. Instead, it’s our language, our social practices and habits of perception that lend things the appearance of intrinsic existence.

ANGELOS: We considered how the criteria for absolute truth matches the criteria of that which doesn’t exist, in that both are prefectly consistent and eternal. To grasp the groundlessness of everything – I suggested – is therefore to grasp nothingness. The claim of enlightenment therefore arises from a realisation of nothingness. It’s not a pretension to any specific knowledge, since that would be something and would not meet the criteria of absolute truth. Yet our contemporary philosophers imply that the ‘groundlessness’ of all things is grapsed through acquiring specific knowledge of lingustic and cultural conventions. Haven’t they contradicted themselves, then, by asserting that there are ‘grounds’ for this supposed ‘groundlessness’?

ERIS: Surely you’re not going to claim that language and culture are unimportant?

ANGELOS: Certainly not. But the very fact that are so important demonstrates that our philosophers haven’t at all grapsed the ‘groundlessness’ of things. What they have grasped is not nothingness, but on the contrary something very salient.

ERIS: Yet without this understanding of the forces that determine our perception and history we’re at the mercy of prejudice and ignorance. You might not consider postmodernism as an equivalent to ‘enlightenment’, but it’s good enough for me! Anyone who rests smugly on a notion of absolute truth will fall victim to their own prejudice by supposing that what seems true to them applies to everyone. And believing that the truth of all things is ‘nothingness’ is tantamount to nihilism.

ANGELOS: If I said that ‘nothingness’ were the truth of everything, then I’d be making something of my nothing. But it’s more subtle than that, Eris. The absolute can’t merely stand in opposition to the relative; the type of nothingness I’m talking about isn’t simply the ‘opposite’ of something. If it were, it would be defined in relation to something, in which case it would itself be relative and not absolute – nor nothing, for that matter. The truly absolute is the negation of something, but it must also be engaged in negating itself.

ERIS: Sounds like a mouthful of philosophical verbiage to me!

ANGELOS: No. It’s completely practical. Enlightenment is an engagement with this self-negating absolute. Meditation and other spiritual exercises involve the practitioner in the negation of self, therefore bringing the practitioner into line with the nature of the absolute itself, and over time this results in a realisation that the self and the absolute are actually one and the same. Deconstructionism, on the other hand, is completely different. For starters, it never steps from the realm of ideas into experience. And it never obliges us to change ourselves through self-negation in the way that is required to align ourselves with the absolute. Which is probably why you only tend to hear it coming from the mouths of academics.

ERIS: Postmodernism leads us into engagement with cultural forces and institutions. I’d say it engages with the world far more deeply than sitting on a cushion with your eyes shut and pretending you don’t exist.

ANGELOS: I see your point. But ethical consequences certainly arise from a realisation of the absolute. Yet that’s a topic for another time.

ERIS: You’re not trying to side-step the issue, are you Angelos?

ANGELOS: I’d just assumed you’d probably had enough for one day.

ERIS: I’d be fascinated to hear how you suppose that believing in an absolute nothingness makes you a better person.

ANGELOS: You’re such hard work, Eris.

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