The Pool Of Infinite Sorrow

delight is hard

Feb 19, 2024

You just embarrassed yourself in conversation. You tried to make a joke, and it landed poorly. People are looking at you funny now.

There is a cave, and the cave is your embarrassment. You’re standing outside it, trying to see in. The cave is lodged in you like a bullet, and your flesh is swelling around it. Before, you would have suffered with less skill than an animal; letting your muscles tense to control the pain, encasing it in scar tissue and limping on with your life.

But you’re new to this, and eager, and growing increasingly exhausted with your own life, and are inflamed with desperation to see. So, you’ve locked your eyes on the cave.

Somehow, managing to keep it in the center of your attention is the thing that lets you enter it. If you don’t let yourself forget that the cave is there, then you find your legs start forward, into it, almost without you. You did not force yourself to enter, you simply paid attention, and the entering just… happened. To Look is to enter.

Entering is still hard to do because it hurts, a lot. You’re in your bedroom now, bowled over, limbs wrapped around yourself like a knot, dense and punched into your bed. You’re afraid of the cave being true; you are afraid that your social faux pas is proof that these people don’t like you. You are afraid of not being liked.

The cave is cold and offers no reassurance. The black maw eats you, creeping up your skin like acid. These people don’t like you. The cave is the world where this is true.

You could run away. It would be easy to - you have lots of memories of these people saying nice things to you. You know that it’s easy to exaggerate things in your own head. You’re dimly aware that you’re a sensitive, insecure person who is probably misinterpreting things. These facts hang behind you like gentle, loving lights, beckoning you back. You don’t have to enter this cave, they say. You can believe they like you. You don’t have to endure being eaten by sorrow.

You want those relieving facts to be true. You want this so badly you can hardly stand it. But you’re staring at the cave now, and you see that your want is part of it; the stones that build the entrance are made out of your longing, and in the contrast of its shadow is your fear. In your yearning for relief, you’ve become terrified of not having it. You’ve made your own wound, and now it’s settled in the left side of your stomach like a sunken ship.

So you don’t run. You’re here to Look, and you need to see what’s inside.

The process of walking in is the process of grieving; you cry, hard and ugly. You have no room for anything else; the pain is in your intestines and fingers and teeth and mind; it’s so intense it undoes you, and you become a conduit for some infinite agony. You’ve found a thick, black lake of sorrow, nestled in an ancient valley between mountains made of smoke. And the lake is infinite; no matter how much you drink or drain there will always be more; so to drink from it isn’t to act upon the lake, it is the lake acting upon you. You don’t hurt in order to do something, to get anywhere, to manage it or get it over with, you simply hurt because it’s there to be felt. To hurt in this way is a profound form of submission. It is worship.

Here, your fear is true. Here, your friends don’t like you; they never really liked you. They’ve just been tolerating you. The connection you thought you had with them exists only in your head, and you’re really alone.

Here, your mouth and nose are full of the stuff, you’re not you anymore, you’re just a creature who’s been split open head to pelvis by the black acid shooting through your spine. In your bedroom, your body groans; no sobs anymore, just the intense, concentrated grunts of overwhelming pain, like giving birth.

And…now what? You’re here, dissolved, and now there’s nowhere else to go. You’re drunk with the agony of loneliness and it’s in you now, underneath the skin of your palms. There’s nothing left to bring yourself into contact with, nothing else to look for, because that pain is now a part of the You that Looks. You are in the world where you have been abandoned. You have grieved it, are grieving it, will always grieve it.

It was hard when the cold was settling into you, but now that it’s here, you’re… somehow okay? It still hurts, but the hurt is quiet. You aren’t moving into it or against it, and in that stillness, where the current has finally settled, you find peace. You’ve plunged in and somehow still have consciousness behind your eyes and you’re somehow okay. And there you find the lesson—in a world where you are alone, you will still be okay.

Here, you also find extraordinary love. You’ve drunk from the pool of infinite sorrow, and you know you’re not the first. You know it’s the same substance that every conscious being touches and twists away from, and by inhabiting it you can touch them too. By not resisting your pain, you can be with them in theirs. This alone makes it worth it. Pleasure is great, but pain is increased surface area with which to touch others; this is a unique, brutal gift of intimacy.

The gentle shining lights that were beckoning you before—it’s okay, remember all the times they demonstrated love and affection—these now look like a trap, a will-o-the-wisp hovering over a bog. It wasn’t really about truth, you realize now. The urge in you to “figure out the truth” was really about just giving you an excuse to not hurt, because you were afraid to hurt.

Now that you’re here, the lights aren’t even alluring. You don’t want to be rescued. There’s nothing to be rescued from. You don’t need your friends to like you in order to be okay.

Later, when you meet up with your friends again, they don’t actually seem to remember your embarrassing joke.

They laugh with you and compliment you and you feel cared for, and with this comes a new form of gratefulness. Isn’t it wonderful, that you could be in any number of worlds, many of them painful, but instead you happen to find that your friends like you? With the pain of the cave so close, you find the gratitude by contrast to be overwhelming. This is so nice. You are squirming with delight. You are compulsively emitting delight. When your mind relaxes, the floor beneath you is a solid base built out of delight. There’s no way you could have felt this delight while also desperately needing to feel it in order to be okay. Really, it seems the nature of this delight is that it’s not needed. Like a lover, it arrives only when you are fully okay without it. You can’t truly feel gratitude for something you think is owed.

Ah, but beware, others might say, you talk about coming to terms with what is, but in this situation your friends did actually like you. Isn’t going into the cave a delusion?

Your friends liking you was something you were both desperate to believe, and also happened to be true. You used the evidence of its truth as an excuse to not question your desperation.

You were fortunate to be in a universe where you were liked, but out of all of possible universespaces, the universe where you weren’t liked is pretty close by. Your ability to understand the universe you were in was constrained by your intolerance of the universes you weren’t in. Your soul was constantly reassuring itself that, don’t worry, the other universe isn’t real, it can’t hurt you. But it could be real, and thus it was influencing you! You existed in a cramped reaction to its possible realness.

Your job then, in a sense, was less to sit with and accept what is, but to make peace with all that might be. Cave exploration isn’t about reality, it’s about what could be—but you can only mourn if, at least for a little while, you live in that darker world.

One day, you tell a friend that it turns out you just have to go into and through the pain and then you come out fine and it’s great. Later she comes back to you and tells you she tried it, really focused, but it went terribly. She was consumed by anxiety and horror, and feels worse than before.

You ask her more questions, and conclude that maybe instead of going into the pain, she went into her resistance to the pain. Here you realize maybe there’s some subtle distinction, one you don’t know how to articulate well, where you ended up messily failing a friend.

Because properly going into a cave hurts, and the pain comes from unfulfilled desire. But the caves themselves are made out of longing - you want something so badly that the world where you don’t have it becomes intolerable, and you contort yourself out of fear of that world being true. And thus the more you desire, the deeper the cave grows.

So how do you step into the pain of your desire without reinforcing the cave?

Maybe trying to do cave exploration only works if you’re willing to accept the Pool of Infinite Sorrow. If you’re experiencing the pain as something that should not be, as some sort of terrible error; if you’re drinking from the pool with the goal to drain it; if your final goal is a painless state, and a part of your soul cannot tolerate coming to rest within grief, then this will only reinforce the cave. Any time you’re not willing to accept what’s in the cave—if some part of you only is willing to enter so long as the cave contains a specific outcome—then you’re just reinforcing it. You can’t enter without deep acceptance.

So, is it okay to rest in hurt? Yes, because hurting is the correct and holy response. Someone you love leaves you or dies? Your mourning is worship. Your health declines? You should hurt, because you loved being able to run. You scrape a knee, or someone says a mean thing to you on the internet, or you ran an errand and the store was closed? Your grief honors your desire. There’s no grief too small or abstract or obscure.

It’s okay to want things. You are a being made out of wants; you might argue on some level this is what consciousness is. To Be is To Want, and wants by definition are unfulfilled (you can’t want what you already have), and thus in a sense you are already made out of grief. Your sorrow is the mechanism with which you touch reality.

Asking if it’s okay to hurt is like asking if it’s okay to be - it’s a malformed question.

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

—Eugene Gendlin

It turns out there’s more caves than the ‘friends don’t like you because you said something dumb’ one. If you really look, you find that your entire body is made out of rocks, giant rigid pockets quarantining all your fears away from your conscious experience. There’s so many you can barely move.

You begin the long process of locating and entering every single one. And there’s so many; there’s dozens of variants on loneliness - romantic, existential, practical. You’re afraid of things happening to you - getting sick, losing your money, being a failure. You’re afraid of being things, and this is a way bigger field - you’re afraid of being weak, embarrassing, stupid, cowardly, uncomfortable, creepy, unsexy, annoying, imperceptive, selfish.

Really, you are basically one giant want, a monster of yearning, constructed out of a thousand sub-limbs of increasingly specific desires. You want your parents to be proud of you; to accomplish things you’re proud of; to be cool; to be interesting; to be loved; to be seen, to not be alone.

Some are silly - you want to be the hottest person in the world, or never ever be disappointed. Some are tiny - you want to eat a cookie. On every level, you are vibrating with Want and Terror. Your mantras often center around two questions, on a loop - what do you want? and what are you afraid of? They seem the most important, everything else hangs from them.

Some caves are harder and require more agony than others. You discover you’re very attached to being able to move your body, or not freezing in wildernesses, or having everyone you love die.

So you spend much time walking into all the caves, and your sense of identity expands to include all these terrible universes. You become ugly and stupid and embarrassing. You live in a world where nobody would ever love you; you are ignored and annoying and a coward. You will never get the cookie. You are a bad person - unkind, a sadist, dangerous, and people are right to avoid you.

Slowly, you enter all the terrible universes around you and a part of your soul stays with each one. This is excruciating. Even when you’re not in active focus, even during your waking life, some part of you is touching the infinite lake. The pain is easy to access, right under your hands.

As you go through cave by cave, you are becoming whittled away; your body, previously made out of hard quarantined pockets, is now bleeding mass; with each cave dissolved is a chunk taken out of your side, and you are growing narrow. The less you are, the more you can see. By this point, cave exploration is less a concrete activity, where you sit down and focus and have a process and then release, but more of a way of being. You’ve been doing this so intensely that it’s become a subconscious habit, and is spread out over longer times. It’s like your brain has grown a thousand tiny fingers that are constantly untying knots and massaging on a miniature scale, all the time, all without your supervision.

And of course, this is very painful most of the time, and excruciating often.

Your life also becomes very pleasurable most of the time, and full of overwhelming delight often.

Now, you are done. You’re not through - you keep falling through the world, which keeps being scary in completely novel ways. But in some way, you are done. You have learned how to stop being in reaction to and learned how to be with.

As you move through your life, each stress that touches you is already processed. You are no longer a reaction. You are more yourself, expanding to fill the places that used to be fear, something like being whole. You’ve taken up with your own deviance. You become something that looks like bravery.

And of course, there is the delight. You exist in and in contrast to the sorrow, and that contrast is deep, satisfying gratitude. Isn’t it incredible to be alive? To be able to see with eyes at all? To be able to feel the ground? To be able to want things? To be a solid person with a narrative and goals? To be able to grieve? You paid a hefty price for this gratitude, and you would gladly pay it again.

Delight is bound to the back of sorrow, and made of the same thing. Maybe your purpose now is to crawl around this earth and love others with that strange substance of shadow and glory.