… the question, nor the problem. The problem is and always has been, much like with any will and force of nature, what we do with it.
Making an art of life …
… means sacrificing much of the things you call hobbies, which are nothing but casual activities of enjoyment, because art is just like work: hard.
My Vanity
For the first in my life I have experienced just what it means to arrive at the recognition that ‘no matter what you do, nothing will make you happy’. I recognised that I could fulfill all of my needs, desires, hopes, dreams, aspirations, ambitions, loves, joys, and I would still be left with nothing, and that some new desire would immediately arise. I realised just how excruciating it is, to both approach the world from your needs as it is to have all of your needs fulfilled. My need-centered view of the world leads me nowhere. But, I wondered, is this all there is to life? Is there nothing else? Am I doomed to fulfil a bottomless pit of my desires and needs? Surely this is not everything there is to existence, for then what would life be but a guaranteed and complete misery?
I recently had an experience whose content I cannot really express here because it would defeat the point. It suffices to say that I looked upon a circumstance and I felt the same rise in fluctuation that is the basis of seeing the world from a needy perspective. That sense of movement towards something out of a sense of lack mixed with fear, frustration and anger. I coloured the circumstance in accordance with my needs, and I felt the same sadness rise in me, as it does when I realised the futility of fulfilling my needs, to the point that I could not contain my tears. So I just stopped and did not react. I waited.
Once the fluctuation I experienced in my body slowly began to drop I felt something uncanny rise in me, first as a feeling, an affect, and then as a thought. I began to consider, no longer what I wanted from the circumstance, but what it is that I could offer to the circumstances. Then, my vanity, that clever little thing that is so attached to itself it would do anything, absolutely anything, not to lose itself or be dissolved into the nothing that it is. She played a trick on me. This crafty wench began to think about how, by offering herself to the circumstance, she may, by this route, get her needs fulfilled. So, she gave herself in order to get what she needed. Then my fluctuations doubled. I realised, that my vanity had her pretty little claws sunk deep into the flesh of the most selfless and overflowing moments of my existence — the moments where I thought that I was being a star and a bucket overpouring with life, these were the moments where my vanity had revealed to me her neck and lured me into her cold bed.
I found that what people of all ages have been calling, enlightenment, salvation, union, satori, etc. is precisely the state I find myself pushing towards. It is this horrific and painful struggle between giving to the world what you are, and seeking from it what you need. These are not really activities, no, they are perspectives or orientations to the world and our activities. They are ways of seeing things that can fundamentally change the flavour and texture of our world. It is not the case that once I attain a comfort and stability with this perspective that I will at last overcome all of my needs; I will still have needs, and I will still be motivated to fulfill them, but the attitude and perspective of my reasons, aims and activities towards the fulfilment of my needs will fundamentally alter. I will, at that moment, behold a different world.
But, I am not there yet. I have an enemy in my heart that I have yet to make a friend. I do not know how to escape my enemy’s claws such that I may finally fall into this perspective. I dance between need and offering in hope that one day something inside me will impel me towards that final jump into freeflow. That jump that must continuously be made day after day, moment by moment, because it is not a final state, but a perpetual activity. But, as is the case with all activites, I need to be able to do it once, to learn and feel how it is done, in order to keep doing it and finally in order to perfect it…
From now on, let me give without expecting or needing anything in return. And let not my need be concealed in my actions like a worm is within the apple. Let my actions be an overflowing of life. Let this overflowing transform my need, because as sure as I am alive, what I see and feel as my need is the very foundation of my life. But, let me, finally, not see and feel it as a need — let me be and live as the eternity that I already am within this parenthesis we call life…
There is a beautiful thing about social life…
… that we do not notice. Those we hate as much as those we love, and sometimes they are the same person, we struggle over and over to comprehend and deal with… so, simply in order to cope with the cognitive disarray of their influence in our lives, we internalise them….
The reason we do not grow…
… into what we want to become is because we are simply lazy and conservative by nature. We are illogical, irrational and run on unquestioned and unexplored principles inherited from our youth, like mother and father, like teacher and society. But, what is going on here? What speaks when we are called forth to growth and we resist? What else, but vanity…
We make our vanity, what we used to think about ourselves and the world, more important than something new. We do not want to change the way we see things because this risks a recognition: that we are not as wonderful and special as we think, that we just may be worse than we imagined, and that because of this we had stopped and grown comfortable in who and what we are. And this comes with a strong, heartfelt pain and ache, we die a little, we die a lot. We shed a skin.
Don’t underestimate the extent and power of your vanity.
It is true, …
… men are fundamentally overwhelmed by a woman’s beauty and force. So much so that women are forced to walk around being and exposing one third of who and what they actually are as well as can be. Some women, in time, even forget the extent of their being and force, the extent and power of their sensitivity, beauty and openness. They become blocks of ice as opposed shimmering vases overflowing with water from the Fountain of Youth.
This trend and approach to social life has contributed to producing weakened men, and dissatisfied women. We all contribute to this, men and women alike. Men contribute to it through their squirming and shyness around a woman who is exuding divine beauty and exhilarated sensitivity that shoots out from her full openness and receptivity to the world. Men are afraid of the emotions and self-reflexive state aroused in them by an open woman. Women contribute to this by responding to a man’s shyness and squirm by closing their openness and sensitivity, and deciding to become either blocks of ice or to exude a simulacrum of beauty and sensitivity that is like a veil over a closed heart. Women defend themselves out of distrust by placing a block on their openness and sensitivity.
Some cultures are characterised by a sense of deep dissatisfaction stemming, in both cases, from fear. It takes just one courageous soul in the bunch to open everybody up — it takes a soul that is willing to deal with people’s nonsense, and to do so firmly and tenderly.
There is a certain perspective…
… on sexuality and sexual attraction that has grown on me recently. I have come to swallow the toughest emotional pills growing from this perspective, and I fancy myself a philosopher and an individual who can sustain a vast range of thoughts about the nature of existence and the world. This thought however had not been the same. For weeks I had to, on my own and in silence, endure all the torment this recognition brought to my world, myself and most importantly how I related to both, a torment that follows all drastic changes from the root up. How could I share this thought with anybody? What would it mean if I let this thought out into the world and made people become of aware of just how uninvolved they are in the things they believe to be the most involved? Even now I struggle to express it clearly and adequately so I could make you feel the sentiment that dominates this thought. It hurts. It cuts deep. Brace yourself. When you read and digest the thoughts below, you must do your best to suspend your moral intutions and sentiments. There is nothing moral about the this perspective, and your moral feelings will squirm as your imagination assumes this perspective.
I have recognised that sexuality and sexual attraction is a force of nature, and like any force, it is subject to certain laws and conditions. Just like a force of nature it is something that is outside of our conscious control, more correctly, it is outside of our control in the full-fledged sense, e.g. like we are in control of our arm. But, like all forces of nature, we can learn and practice to channel and contain it, to divert it towards certain ends like we divert electricity towards a television and light-bulb, and like we divert gravity towards flight.
This recognition made it clear to me that sexuality requires certain conditions and the coming together of certain things in the broad sense. The things are people and the conditions are certain modes of activity. Sexuality is the force that manifests and pulls people towards one another when they meet in the middle and relate after having both been in distinct modes of activity. One person has to be engaging in a specific mode of activity, and the other has to be engaging in the complementary form of activity. They create a complementary unity of opposites right before the actual unification of bodies occurs.
How it feels (at least from my perspective, I have yet to ask how this feels for the reciprocal partner). At the beginning of this attraction, you experience a subtle collapse into silence and full-fledged attention towards the person. It begins with your attention: they draw your awareness in with their activity. All of a sudden you feel lighter and somehow more free than before, like a weight has been taken off your shoulders. You feel light on your feet and free in your spirit. Then, comes the infamous irritation, the all-body movement towards them: your eyes, your posture, and even your drive is now actively and directly tiltled towards them. The irritation concentrates in your chest and belly sending waves through your muscles spurring them to draw the person in. (I presume, from the perspective of the reciprocal partner it would feel almost the same: but perhaps without the activity or movement, I presume the reciprocal partner feels a desire to be pulled or drawn in like a magnet draws in . Also, the irritation would differ by being an extreme oscillation throughout the body that almost calls, screams and yearns to be brought back down from its extremity by the partner’s touch.)
My experience has tought me that indeed there are many forces that possess us, and each one has its own distinct form of interaction between activities that, like a law of nature, cannot be broken. As of yet, we do not know the extent to which these forces operate on and manifest around us, less how embedded they are in our lives.
Let me give you an example of the complexity of sexuality that I have encountered in my own experience. I have found that women are extremely loyal, certainly and on average, more loyal than men. I have found that a woman who is in love with a man with whom she is not regularly engaging in the activity that manifests sexual attraction, or there is some kind of block somewhere between them, she will (at first) perform this activity with herself and then another man. She will do so to reach up to the point where her body feels that overwhelming vibration and then she will take this vibration to the man she loves and offer herself to him to be taken. After a while, and if this process continues, she eventually gives up and cheats on the him with another man. But, the first few times or so, she always goes back to the man she loves. The reasoning for her actions will be as complex as her intelligence, but the drive and activity is as simple and expressive as the light of day. Eventually she leaves, not because she does not love the man, but because she loves another man more or more fully: and this far her reasoning will take her, whilst her body and its forces naturally lead her.
What I wondered, and what wounded me for a long time up until this moment, is whether her reasoning of these events and occurrences are based on sexual attraction or on some other force? I had feared the answer to this question for a long time even though it is simple. My fear stemmed from a lack of understanding and exploration: I had no idea just how and to what extent sexual attraction affects our lives on the whole. I found that sexual attraction has nothing to do with loyalty and love, it is a pure force that happens on a small and large scale day by day. It is not only a force, but also a need. My lover, my woman, eventually my wife and yes even my daughter, but also me too and everybody, will experience this same force on a day to day scale, and at times it will be small, whilst at others it will be grand and overwhelming.
For months I had to learn to live with the thought that as I sit down with my lover on public venue, she will be naturally drawn towards men and that if I sensed an irritation and a wavering of her attention that the reason was this exact thing: that a force was taking over her and calling her into a fusion and unity. I sat on this feeling for a long time and I struggled with it over and over again. Finally, I realised that I am exactly like her, and the way in which this force operates on me will do so on her and I learned to empathise and recognise through my own personal experience what she was feeling. Slowly slowly, the deeply emotional hold, a hold through fear, that this perspective had on me grew into pure strength. I saw it as a dance and a game that I could share with her at will, if I learned to discern the subtleties of the activities that call forth this force. Finally, I began to use this perspective in order to channel this force by a better understanding of its conditions and reciprocal activities… I began to learn how to make art out of it.
The value of a heartbreak…
… lays in the shock to the system that it provides, a shock that is necessary. It creates a schism within you that forces you to finally pay attention to your body and its signals, to notice and be reflective over yourself, that is, to become aware of your values and needs as well as your actions relative to them. It forces you to become acquainted with yourself, and to work towards a unity between your parts. Then, once you’ve gone through the long journey upwards from the depths of pain and despair, whose duration is subjective, you emerge with a strength of soul that is no longer blind and fleeting, but lucid and grounded. Heartbreak gives shape to your life.
Fear’s shadow over your love
Never allow your fear to cast a shadow over your love, like a weed casts a shadows over a radiant rose… no… confront it. Even if it means living through that which you fear so that you finally prove to yourself that what you feared is not as bad as you made it out to be. What you fear is never bad enough to force you to refrain from loving, from holding back what you really are deep down.
What does it mean…
… to affirm all the darkest parts of your nature? What does it mean to say yes, or yes I am, or yes I possess, feel and indulge in all the dark and negative emotions: envy, cruelty, jealousy, anger, hate, greed, lust, fear, worry…? Well, let me give you an example that serves as a metaphor, because when we try to characterise the end of something old and the beginning of something new, we find that we run out of adequate words and concepts in order to put our understanding across to others. This moment and state of which I am about to speak constitutes the beginning of the end of a two thousand-year old tradition in moralising and the effects this has had on our psychological orientation to the world. It also constitutes the beginning of an entirely new psychological and moral orientation.
***
Imagine you lived in a house with a room which you were raised from childhood all the way to adulthood not to open, you were raised to do this with all manner of psychic techniques. You are told and taught, in some way or other, that this room is fundamentally forbidden. As you go about your days, you recognise that there are things missing in your house that you need in order to live your day to day life. You wonder, “where can all this stuff be? A normal house should possess all this stuff”. One day, you see your father walking around with one of them in his hand, and then you ask, “where has this been, I’ve been looking for it”. He replies, “oh, this is nothing”, he conceals the utensil from you and walks away. Eventually, seeing more and more things appear that you need, and receiving the same replies from your loved-ones, you realise that something is wrong here. One day, you decide to pay close attention to your parents and their movements. Eventually you decide to spy on them. You realise that all along they had been going into the room to draw out utensils. You are shocked and confused as to why they would tell you not to go in there when they themselves go in there to get what they need. What can be so dreadful about this room? Then, you make the decision to overcome your fears and worries, the concerns raised to you from your childhood and enter it. You find that it’s a room full of tools that can be dangerous to a child, but extremely useful to an adult. Then, like the last piece of the puzzle, you recognise what was happening all along: you were being protected from your own demise. But, you wonder, why didn’t they just let go of their little game and taught me how to use these tools when I grew of age? You reason: they must have gotten so used to me being young and so used to their reasoning, at the same time so caught up in them, that they forgot to show me how to use them, or even let me. As you pay more and more attention to what they do with the tools and as you get more acquainted with the tools yourself (without their knowing of course), you recognise that they themselves do not really know how to use them well, and you are getting better.
***
Morality is a stepping stone in our growth and evolution: all of the things morality forbids and dubs as evil are tools in a dark room that are necessary for our lives. Learn how to use them, envy, jealousy, hatred, anger, lust, all of them… I know it’s difficult and fearfful, but start now all the same, it is your destiny to master these emotions, do not prolong its fulfilment.
