Zazen

At thirteen, Evangelos spray-paints his Athens school with enough skill to prove he‘s not vandalizing-he‘s making art. This distinction haunts him for seventeen years as he dismantles every boundary between enlightenment and self-destruction. Art school: He doses his friend with twelve hundred micrograms of LSD. Her consciousness shatters permanently. Years later, he returns to complete his degree by chewing thirty-three sheets of archival paper for sixty-six hours, transforming them into toilet paper through saliva. His thesis argues the body knows what the mind forgets. His mother dies. Everything changes. He fasts for moksha-forty-nine kilograms, psychiatric commitment, forced feeding, antipsychotics crushing the states he‘d accessed through starvation. He flees to India, where Aghoris teach him that sacred and profane are optical illusions. He covers himself in cremation ash, swims in the Ganges at burning ghats, learns that extremes aren‘t pathology when backed by three thousand years of ceremony. Back in Athens, he builds an impossible monastery: prostitutes sitting zazen in his garage. Georgian strippers, Nigerian brothel workers, the women traditional spirituality excludes. Thursday evenings, Saturday mornings. Presence under actual duress. Then a pimp destroys it. Immigration raids. Deportations. The sangha scatters. His sister delivers the final blow: "Stop performing Buddha. Meditation is sitting around doing nothing." She‘s accidentally right. He‘s been using community as armor against solitary practice-the zazen that dissolves not just ego but the substrate producing egos. Against recognizing the self is fiction, consciousness discontinuous, becoming someone just elaborate avoidance of the void‘s patient invitation. The book ends where practice begins: alone in his childhood bedroom, learning to be no one after thirty years becoming someone. No communities left to build. No prostitutes to save. No excuses remaining. Just breath and dissolution and the terrible recognition that arrives when running finally stops.