From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The empty world meditation
This sequence is referenced in Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters (numbered instances #3, #9, #27). See also Shanbudia and the narrator's frame.
A sequence of guided second-person audio meditations walking the listener through imagined depopulated landscapes. The speaker addresses you directly: *You are standing at the intersection of King Street and Hunter Street. The shops are closed. There are no cars. Listen.*
Each meditation constructs precise geography—a library, a shopping mall, a carpark, a public pool—rendered empty, silent, and waiting. The listener's task is to walk (physically or in imagination) through these spaces while the narrator describes what is absent: missing fluorescence, absent footsteps, the presence of an absence.
Meditations are numbered non-sequentially (instances #3, #9, #27 confirmed; others unknown), suggesting a larger, incompletely catalogued archive [citation needed]. Some are site-specific (walking routes in Newcastle, Shanbudia); others generalizable (any empty city at dawn).
The practice emerges from the novel's frame—games played inside the head while walking an empty city. It invites listeners to experience the gap between perception and being.
Scholars debate whether it is therapeutic, theological, or diagnostic. It may be all three.