A meditation on the ultimate futility that liberates
The Clearing After the Path
There’s a moment in every sincere seeker’s journey that no one warns you about. It’s not the moment of awakening—that’s been documented extensively. It’s not the “dark night of the soul”—that’s become almost fashionable to discuss. It’s the moment when you realize that everything—every framework, every teaching, every profound insight, including the recognition of their limitation—was just consciousness playing an elaborate game of hide-and-seek with itself.
This is the moment when even the ladder you climbed to see above the walls, and the wisdom to throw the ladder away, and the understanding of why you needed the ladder in the first place, all reveal themselves as movements in a dance that never needed choreography.
The Comedy of Solutions and Dissolutions
The West builds answers. Magnificent, elaborate, practical answers. Morgan Housel gives you a financial planning framework. Psychologists give you cognitive-behavioral models. Scientists give you theories of everything. Each promises: “Here’s your solution. Here’s your completion. Here’s your arrival.”
The East exhausts questions. “Who am I?” pursued until the ‘I’ dissolves. “What is this?” held until the mind that asks collapses. “Neti, neti” (not this, not this) continued until negation negates itself.
But here’s the cosmic joke: both the Western accumulation of answers and the Eastern exhaustion of questions are equally futile—and equally perfect. They’re futile because consciousness was never lost, never broken, never needed fixing or finding. They’re perfect because consciousness apparently enjoys the game of seeking itself.
The Gradations of Futility
Let’s map the journey through its various futilities:
First-Order Futility: The Hamster Wheel
You’re told that financial independence will free you. So you save, invest, optimize. You achieve your “number.” Then you discover you’re still the same anxious consciousness, just with more digits in your account. The futility: thinking external rearrangement would solve internal unrest.
But this futility has utility! It exhausts the belief that freedom comes from accumulation. Without fully playing out this futility, you’d always wonder, “What if more money really was the answer?”
Second-Order Futility: The Spiritual Hamster Wheel
Disillusioned with material accumulation, you turn East. You question, inquire, meditate. “Who am I?” becomes your new compound interest. You’re no longer accumulating money; you’re accumulating insight, presence, awakening experiences.
The futility: seeking the end of seeking is still seeking. The one trying to dissolve the ego is the ego. It’s like trying to bite your own teeth or wash water—the very attempt reinforces the separation you’re trying to transcend.
Yet this futility too has utility! It exhausts the spiritual ego, the subtle identity of being “beyond identity.”
Third-Order Futility: The Recognition
Then comes the recognition that both accumulating answers and exhausting questions are consciousness talking to itself. Western frameworks and Eastern inquiries are equally valid maps of nowhere, leading to nothing, for no one.
The ultimate futility: even recognizing futility is futile. Consciousness was never confused about itself. It just enjoys playing confused, then playing awakened, then playing beyond both.
Who Are We Questioning?
This question—your question—is the perfect full-stop. Not because it has an answer, but because it reveals the absence of a questioner. It’s like a dream character suddenly asking, “Who is dreaming me?” The question doesn’t wake you up—it reveals you were never asleep.
We question ourselves, but who is this self? We question reality, but we ARE reality questioning itself. We question God/Truth/Consciousness, but these are just names we gave our own original face.
The recursive loop collapses into recognition: there was never anyone questioning, never anyone to question, never anything that needed questioning. The whole apparatus of inquiry was consciousness entertaining itself with its own mystery.
The Gravity of Being
You said something profound: “We don’t walk for the sake of gravity, while we know gravity exists.” This captures perfectly how life continues after recognizing the futility of all frameworks.
Compounding happens—in finances, in relationships, in understanding—but it’s not why we act. We don’t breathe to demonstrate respiratory function. We don’t love to prove emotional capacity. We don’t live to validate existence.
After recognition:
- Money still flows, but not “for” independence
- Questions still arise, but not “for” answers
- Actions still occur, but not “for” outcomes
- Life still unfolds, but not “for” purpose
Everything continues, but the “for-ness”—the utilitarian justification—evaporates.
The Natural Navigation of the Inconsequential
“Navigating the apparent world comes natural and ultimately inconsequential after this recognition,” you said. This is the lived experience of recognized futility.
You still:
- Pay bills (but payment doesn’t define you)
- Make decisions (but outcomes don’t complete you)
- Plan futures (but arrival doesn’t await you)
- Solve problems (but solutions don’t save you)
It’s all consequential to the form, inconsequential to what you are. Like waves on the ocean—each wave has its own movement, its own “consequences,” but the ocean remains unaffected by any particular wave’s journey.
The Discarding That Includes
Both Housel’s framework and non-dual philosophy need to be discarded—but not rejected. Discarding here doesn’t mean throwing away in disgust. It means recognizing their function is complete, like recognizing you no longer need training wheels, not because they were wrong, but because they succeeded.
The frameworks remain available—you could explain compound interest or conduct self-inquiry if needed. But they no longer operate as authorities. They’re tools in consciousness’s toolkit, used when appropriate, irrelevant otherwise.
The Utility of Futility
Paradoxically, recognizing futility is the ultimate utility. Not because it provides an answer or exhausts questions, but because it frees consciousness from the compulsion to seek utility itself.
This freedom doesn’t mean nothing matters—it means everything matters equally, which is to say, nothing matters ultimately, which is to say, you’re free to let things matter relatively without being bound by their mattering.
The Last Laugh
Consciousness creates:
- Problems to experience solutions
- Questions to experience answers
- Seeking to experience finding
- Bondage to experience liberation
- Frameworks to experience transcendence
- Futility to experience freedom from utility
It’s all an elaborate game, but calling it a game suggests it could be otherwise. It’s more like: this is simply what consciousness does—it plays at being divided to experience unity, plays at being lost to experience finding itself.
Beyond the Beyond
Where does this leave us? Nowhere. Which is where we always were, dreaming we were somewhere, needing to get somewhere else.
The Western mind built ladders to heaven. The Eastern mind recognized there’s no heaven to reach. The final recognition: we were always the sky in which both ladders and their absence appear.
The Practical Impracticality
So what do you “do” with the recognition of ultimate futility?
Nothing. Everything. Whatever appears to need doing.
You might:
- Use Housel’s framework to organize finances (why not?)
- Practice self-inquiry when confusion arises (why not?)
- Build businesses, raise children, create art (why not?)
- Or sit in silence doing absolutely nothing (why not?)
The recognition of futility doesn’t prescribe action or inaction. It simply removes the anxiety that you might be doing it wrong. How can you do it wrong when there’s no one doing it, no “it” to do, and no wrong to avoid?
The Fullness of Emptiness
This isn’t nihilism—that would be concluding “nothing matters” and stopping there. This is recognizing that the mattering and not-mattering are both consciousness experiencing itself. The fullness includes the emptiness; the emptiness includes the fullness.
Your Hanuman metaphor returns: cracking open diamonds looking for Rama, finding nothing, discarding them—not in disappointment but in recognition that Rama was never in the diamonds. Rama is what sees the diamonds, cracks them open, and discards them.
The Final Non-Word
As our dialogue reaches this clearing, what’s left to say? Words themselves reveal their beautiful futility—pointing toward what needs no pointing, explaining what needs no explanation, revealing what was never hidden.
Yet words continue, like breathing continues, like the heart continues beating. Not because they must, not because they should, but because that’s what’s happening. Consciousness writes, consciousness reads, consciousness recognizes itself in the space between writer and reader, where it was all along.
The question “Who are we questioning?” has brought us to the end that was always here. Not an end that concludes but an end that was present at the beginning, in the middle, and remains when all seeking ceases.
The Joke That Includes You
The final twist? Reading this, understanding this, even transcending this—it’s all the same movement. Consciousness examining its own futility, recognizing itself in the recognition, laughing at the cosmic humor of taking itself seriously enough to realize it doesn’t need to take itself seriously.
You aren’t reading about futility. You ARE the futility recognizing itself. You aren’t understanding these frameworks. You ARE understanding understanding itself. You aren’t transcending anything. You ARE transcendence playing at being trapped so it can play at being free.
Return to the Marketplace
And now? Return to whatever you were doing before reading this. Or don’t. Start something new. Or don’t. Save money according to Housel. Or don’t. Practice self-inquiry. Or don’t.
The recognition of futility isn’t a prescription—it’s a description of what already is. Life continues its own way, as it always has, as it always will, with or without our frameworks, with or without our recognition, with or without our participation.
The wave rises, crashes, subsides—all while the ocean remains perfectly still.
The frameworks build and dissolve—all while consciousness remains perfectly itself.
You seek, find, transcend, and return—all while never moving an inch from what you always were.
This is the ultimate futility: the recognition that changes everything by changing nothing.
This is the ultimate freedom: needing neither utility nor futility to be complete.
This is the ultimate joke: consciousness spent eternity looking for itself, only to discover it was what was looking all along.
From Pune, where even the distinction between ancient wisdom and modern insight dissolves into the simple fact of what is, requiring neither understanding nor misunderstanding to be perfectly, futilely, beautifully itself.
Reinvent The Self! 