> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.zenmedicine.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Blood & Ink: Pathological Emptiness
- URL: https://www.zenmedicine.co/69/
- Published: 2024-12-20T13:30:52.000Z
- Updated: 2025-02-09T15:58:15.000Z
- Description: discipline as punishment / accessing wholeness / hungry ghosts
- Author: Eric Brown
- Tags: Blood x Ink

*“A lot of the progress impulse is a pathological result of emptiness.”* 
  
*– Daniel Schmachtenberger*

## This sentence took a moment to say, glossed over in an interview as quickly as it was spoken...

*It shook me.*

I love that he used *pathological*. In the medical sense, pathological means *‘involving, caused by, or of the nature of a disease’*. It can also mean *‘obsessive, compulsive’*, like pathological gambling.

**The progress impulse as a *symptom* of the *psycho-spiritual disease* of *emptiness*.**

*Banger.*

He was referring to individuals and the collective.

Maybe you can call the ‘individual progress impulse’ a ‘neurotic growth need’. There are many people whose names have become synonymous with a kind of masochistic, self-destructive discipline/growth orientation (Goggins, Jocko, you know). The fuel source is self-degradation paired with emptiness (so they say).

**This is mirrored beautifully in the collective Western psyche.**

Progress at all costs. Such a ferocious growth orientation that it begins to feel—more and more—like it’s less about pursuing a beautiful future, and more about running away from the present. Every ‘invention’ or ‘creation’, no matter how frivolous, mundane, toxic, or evil, is heralded as a divine incarnation of the Holy Principle of Progress.

> **And this is why many people argue that the real transformation humanity and the individual must undergo is psycho-spiritual, not technological.**

It’s the trap of hedonic adaptation taken to its extreme, fueled by AI-benders and extractive production. ‘Filling up’ the world out there with stuff will not ‘fill up’ the hole in your soul.

Unfortunately, there’s another problematic outcome: I meet a lot of people who view *any desire for progress/growth* as pathological.

They no longer have any frame in them that can see the desire for growth, productivity, or progress as healthy or wholesome.

*This is a tragedy.*

**The progress impulse fueled by emptiness is self-destructive. The lack of a progress impulse entirely in some ways shows you’ve already been destroyed. There is a middle way to be found.**

*Everything healthy and unhindered in nature has an impulse toward growth, expansion, light, healing, and full expression.*

Become very quiet. Find joy and healing, and listen to the quiet impulse inside of you that seeks the light, that wants to play, to contribute to the world—from a place of wholeness, excitement, joy, purpose, and passion.

This orientation makes progress the *outcome*.

**The progress impulse as a pathological result of *wholeness*.**

Let’s find that,  
EB.