The Ritual of Unmapping

Previous: Whispering New Directions

I begin with my poem, “Nothing in Particular,” a refusal that performs something more radical than any of my systematic essays:

we burn our maps
in ritual silence

whispering new directions
in no tongue at all

This isn’t metaphor but method: a deliberate practice of releasing the conceptual frameworks that promise orientation but deliver only the illusion of control. The burning maps represent what Karl Jaspers calls our “worldviews.” These are totalizing perspectives that claim to comprehend reality. However, they actually obscure our encounter with what he terms the Encompassing. The Encompassing is that ultimate horizon of all possible experience.

The ritual silence that accompanies this burning points toward what Nagarjuna reveals through his Middle Way. He recognizes that our ordinary language is bound to subject-object duality. This language cannot capture the interdependent arising that constitutes reality’s actual texture. The “new directions” whispered “in no tongue at all” emerge from this space beyond conventional discourse. Jaspers refers to this as “cipher-script.” It is the broken (emptied) language through which the Encompassing intimates itself without ever becoming object.

Boundary Situations and Empty Interdependence

When the poem declares “this is not revolution,” I attempt a simultaneous philosophical distinction and destruction. Revolution operates within existing frameworks, seeking to replace one substantial reality with another. Encountering boundary situations leads to an important realization. In those limit-experiences, our ordinary modes of orientation collapse. The realization that emerges is more fundamental: there were never substantial realities to begin with.

This is where Jaspers’ existential elucidation meets Nagarjuna’s emptiness teaching. Boundary situations force us beyond the familiar frameworks that normally guide everyday choices. However, whatever I discover in that beyond isn’t some new territory to be mapped. Instead, I encounter the groundless ground of interdependent arising. I recognize that all constructions arise through relational processes. This includes the very distinction between construction and deconstruction, as they are empty of inherent (independent) being.

The poem’s “smoky sentences collapsing mid-clause” shows this collapse of ordinary discourse that boundary situations demand. But this breakdown isn’t utter failure although there is a falling-away. It’s the revelation of what was always already the case. The sentences don’t break down into nothing. They reveal their emptiness of independent being. Their meaning arises only in dependence upon readers, contexts, and meanings. These meanings themselves have no fixed (unchanging, static) essence.

Transistance: The Practice of Moving Through

From this philosophical ground emerges what I call transistance. It is a disciplined existential practice. This practice cultivates awareness of our situatedness. It also refuses to be unreflectively drawn into reactive patterns. Transistance is critical training for a calm outlook that remains unmoved by the reactionary traps of conditions over which we have no control.

The term itself performs its meaning: trans (across, through, beyond) combined with sistance (from sistere, to stand, to take a position). It is not resistance, which implies opposition to what is. Instead, it implies the possible way of standing that allows for movement through conditions rather than against them. The practitioner—the “Thinkerer”—learns to dwell in what I call the Cleavage of Ambiguity. This is a chiasm between order and chaos. Here, authentic response becomes possible.

This isn’t passive acceptance but active discernment of where freedom lies within co-existential situations. Transistance recognizes those conditions that cannot be changed. It develops capacity to move with them through mindful composure. By engaging with limitations, one can discover how this engagement reveals the limitless. But it is a first step toward creative drift.

The Tetralogy: A Complete Movement

The full architecture of this practice unfolds through four interconnected currents:

Transist: The foundational posture of moving through rather than against conditions, learning to navigate ambiguity without reactivity. This establishes the disciplined attention that makes authentic response possible.

Transform: The recognition that sustained engagement with conditions reveals them as material for creative possibility. This isn’t transformation of conditions (which would be reactive) but transformation through skillful engagement with what is given.

Transcend: Not escape from limitations but the discovery that authentic engagement with finitude reveals infinite depth. This is transcendence as this-worldly recognition rather than otherworldly flight.

Transvaluate: The creation of new values based on lived encounter with boundary situations rather than imposed from abstract principles. This completes the movement while feeding back into deeper capacity for transistance.

Gathering the Fourfold

My tetralogy mirrors what Heidegger calls the fourfold—that gathering of earth and sky, mortal and immortal that constitutes authentic dwelling. Each movement corresponds to one dimension while requiring all four for completion:

• Transist aligns with the mortal—finite existence learning to navigate without pretending to transcend its situatedness.
• Transform corresponds to the earth—that self-concealing ground that supports all emergence.
• Transcend mirrors the sky—the open dimension that provides horizontal context.
• Transvaluate gathers as the immortal—what endures through transformation.

The practice becomes a way of restoring proper dwelling in the face of its systematic destruction. Operative thinking, as techno-science, separates what belongs together. It reduces mortals to bare life. It turns the earth into a resource. The sky becomes an ideology. The holy is reduced to power.

Transistance, as first in these on-going and repeating steps, re-gathers the fourfold. It does so not by imposing unity. Instead, it creates conditions where authentic relations can emerge.

Meeting Historical Conditions

Critics might dismiss such philosophical reflection as luxury irrelevant to urgent realities. These include genocide in Palestine, Sudan, and Congo; sex trafficking networks; mass incarceration and deportation; climate and ecological collapse; etc et al. But this misses the radical potential of the practice to grasp the place of anti-reason in producing horrific structures.

Systematic dehumanization depends on conceptual violence—the reduction of complex situations to manageable categories that make suffering administrable.

Transistance offers engagement that doesn’t reproduce the very frameworks that enable violence. When we approach Palestinian resistance, Sudanese survival, and Congolese resilience as forms of living truth, we bear witness to the testimony of that suffering. This transforms our understanding. It creates space for responses that address root conditions rather than symptoms.

The method is this: Approach each emergency of dehumanization as a boundary situation that reveals the limits of ordinary understanding. Allow the encounter to burn through assumptions about victimization, theories of oppression, strategies for resistance. Let familiar political language collapse mid-clause.

What manifests is the contrary of paralysis: Showing-up attentively to hear what’s being said by people whose humanity is systematically denied. This presence becomes foundation for actions that respond to actual conditions rather than reactionary projections about what those conditions mean.

The Way Forward

With the poem’s final gesture—“leaving floorplans for nothing in particular”—I seek to captures the essence of this practice. Not blueprints for specific programs but structures that enable response to emerge from encounter rather than preconception. Form that enables rather than constrains, opening space for whatever wants to emerge from genuine meeting with the mystery of existence.

This is how thinkering meets historical conditions: Not by providing better maps but through revealing the emptiness of mapping itself. This opens space for responses that emerge from interdependence rather than the separations that make violence possible. In transgressing the fourfold ambiguity of emptiness, we do not discover escape from the world. Instead, we find a deeper capacity for dwelling within it authentically.

TENTATIVE SERIES OUTLINE

• Whispering New Directions {PREVIOUS]
• A Fourfold for the Current Empire [CURRENT]
• Decluttering Awareness: Nagarjuna and Emptiness [NEXT]
• Showing-Up for Emptiness: Excellence Between Obsession and Apathy
• Responsive to Skillful Attention
• Care-Free Wandering (Zhuangzi)
• Traversing not Avoiding Nihilism (Nishitani)