Practical Obsession
August 31, 2020
Ethan Maurice
By: N. Nosirrah Intro:
A direct, heartless, at times brilliant assault on the known. If Hunter S. Thompson had set out to find Buddha-like enlightenment rather than to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, I suspect something like Practical Obsession would have been the result.
A quick, brash 116 page read, this “autobiography” without storyline recounts the life of “n. Nosirrah” (to spill the beans, that’s Harrison spelled backwards, I believe the book to be a more of a raving, mystic attempt to convey by a wise man named Steven Harrison). The book is a takedown of the idea of self, and suggests that “you” and “I” are not individuals, but false concepts momentarily held by life itself. Even if you believe this is utter nonsense, the cascade of implications are a jarring, fascinating, potentially existential crisis inducing trip.
From disgust to fanaticism, I sense that people will have a remarkable variety of reactions to reading this book. Reading over the below quotes, I seem to have pulled the interspersed gems of a more clean lucidity from among what is also often meandering and brutish — it’s a curious read.
"We exist only in our concept of our self; that concept is itself just a form of resistance to the vast nothingness that awaits the silence of the mind. We maintain our busy life of the mind as a kind of anxiety about our emptiness, and that anxiety is what we think of as our self. We say we want peace, but peace is the end of anxiety, and therefore the end of the self. So what we really want is to want peace, not to have it, because wanting peace is more anxiety and therefore more self. To end wanting peace and to simply be peace is to be nothing and that is a fearless state, or rather, a fearless non-state."
“You will be free when you look death directly in the eye and embrace that finality, a finality that is not in some future, and is not now, but a death that has already happened. You will be free when you are not. You will be free in a moment, and that moment will be celebrated at your funeral because most will not recognize it until then. Your liberation is the strange gift of death — great intensification, total mystery, raw emotion without any resolution and the relentless ongoingness of everything else as if nothing happened at all, which is the paradoxical aspect, that, in fact, nothing at all has happened.”
“Those who walked by me on the streets were not experiencing their life fundamentally but rather as it is socially constructed, where certain behaviors are clearly better than others. They are lost in the fallacy of occupying only the social construct rather than the whole perspective from phenomenological to social.”
“Drop the idea of self and you don’t need to incarnate, reincarnate, or disincarnate. Nothing left to die or be born, just life itself, which is all their ever was and all their ever will be. You just picked up that funny meme that you exist in separation and so you strove to build that retirement account while you raised those kids and argued with your spouse and cut your lawn and all the while fearing you might die, which was just a diversion from the real issue, which is that you were never born, just the idea of you that your parents gave you and their parents gave them. Your real issue was that you were a concept without independent reality, an idea built on agreements made from ideas, you, in short, are a house of cards in a hall of mirrors built on quicksand on a sinking continent that is part of a dying planet falling into a sun going supernova before itself dying and falling with all that surrounds into a black hole made up of nothing but super compressed nothingness and infinite gravity. No wonder you have taken up spirituality to avoid your dilemma.”
“Compassion is that knowing what you see is what you are.”
“I went up afterward and told him Bukowski said, ‘Don’t try.’ He said to me, ‘Don’t try misses the point. The issue isn’t trying, it is trying to act differently than you already are. That is a futile fight with what is. Everything that needs to happen springs from that space of what you are, but what you are is dynamic.’”
“As the stories are told and confirmed, over and over, you will come to remember them as if they actually occurred. Nothing occurs. Everything is story, everything is constructed. The past only exists as you build it, and its burden is only the one that you take on by your own creation.”
“All that I have seen, all that I have achieved, all that I have become amounts to the dust on my desk as I write this. All that you will ever accumulate in your life, all the honors and all the failures, all the wounds and all the love, all of this in its totality is dust. This is not pejorative, it is an invitation to release yourself from the burden of collecting memories and experiences. Imagine a life that is freed from the past, open and available to the nuances of full contact with the world.”
“We can utilize the old because we know what it is, we don’t see it as current, and in that contact with the actual we can extract utility from the past without deluding ourselves that it is still alive.”
“You are that, nothing less than the movement of the universe creating something out of nothing, and nothing out of something. This is the story of my life, it is the story of your life, and it is, in the end, the autobiography of life itself.”
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