i hope that eventually the coherence between these postings will come to light....
After a good week of 'self'-induced laughter and smiling (and ignoring the weight of the pressures to stop), my senses began to see gray again, and the forces of my immediate environment seemed to override my drive. In nearly every personally experienced context I can think of, people are founded in unreasonabe unhappiness and 'relieved' only by the occasional temporary pleasurable stimulus or emotional imbalance. In the course of our evolution, we have adopted (adapted) a psychophysical capacity to retain thoughts (for utility) and with it an endogenous affliction of emotional tention through the burden of painful memories. (Social conditioning is also an obvious factor in this, providing those events we painfully remember.) It affects our minds, bodies, and everything around us.
To our fortune, we still have the tools to heal this wound of an adaptation -- but the teachers and environments who provide the influences to realize this are few and far between. The character based in unreasonalbe happiness, tempered by disturbance for only the length of a single outcry or burst of uncensored laughter, is rare, perhaps as rare as the covert mystic.
May we each find that mentor at some point in our lives. I, too, will remember my breath, to begin again.
True love is painful awareness. And pain is the opportunity to be aware of love.
A man, who'd never seen a video camera recorder before, stops in front of a retail store window when he notices one poining at him and standing next to a television monitor. The photons that reflect off his body and into the recorder translate into pixels of the monitor screen, giving off light rays that filter through his eyeball lens and retina into another sort of translated electrical signals through a complex neural network in his brain. He points his finger at it in excitement. "What is that? Is that what my neck looks like? My face? Why, I can see all of my hair It's me!!" he says, his arm quivering. "It's me!" Out of nowhere, Hakuin appears and begins to hit him with a stick.
4 comments:
Yowch. So if you're not happy, you're unhappy?
I don't think everyone wallows in misery whenever they're not having fun. I don't necessarily think that painful memories impede a person's ability to be generally content. I've heard people argue that those memories are indeed necessary for happiness. As far as emotional experiences, what is the value of the light if it is not contrasted against the dark? And would we know what dark was if we never experienced light?
I do not think gray is so dark a color as you seem to imply.
PS - I also don't like that quote about love and pain. I don't necessarily disagree with it, but I don't like it. I think it's missing the point, it focuses far too much on the pain and doesn't mention anything about the unbelievable quantity of joy love provides. Sure, there's pain in that joy (possibly related to how overwhelming it is), but, well, would you choose to eat plain sugar or fruit (all nasty chemicals aside)? You'd choose fruit, obviously. It's the parts that aren't sweet that make the sweet things survivable, I guess, is what I'm saying.
i'm enjoying this critical side of you...
i can't imagine most people would agree with my brief conjecture on love. (that's one of the beautiful things about it: practically everyone has their own unique experience, and formed or forming opinion, of it.) this is the most concise expression to my feelings on love as i've known it. like a never-ending draft series, it continues to change over time (as do so many things).
your dark/light contrast is an excellent observation. one of the points i've come to, however, is realizing how much the light and dark are really sort of mirror images of each other -- not merely serving as background to the other, but being significantly part of each other by their relationship, much like your fruit analogy (sugar 'n peel). but i don't taste pure sugar biting into a fruit, nor do i experience the more bitter parts -- the experience of the edible flesh of fruit is itself unique to either other experience. gray is not a mere mixture of dark and light but a whole other 'essence' throughout, in my experiences.
how do i say this?: pain does not serve as a contrast to love, but is integrated in love, and love in it. like mistaking ourselves for the image of us on screen, it's easy to simply project pain onto things, like memories, and lose touch with its inherent part of a unique experience. my awareness is painful -- staying in the present moment is (at least for now) difficult, to say the least. but that is part of the experience of true love for me, and so not only is it worth it but in a way i treasure the pain involved. it is the gray -- and i love it. this is how pain and love don't serve as opposing forces, nor as some awkward blend or mix, but as an integration of one as (and through) the other.
in other words, i'm not all that happy with dualisms anymore, and my little dual-clauses piece is for me something of a closure to that habit (as best as i can manage) to conceptualizing that way.
thank you for your comment so that i could highlight this :)
Actually, now that I come back to it, I'm kind of surprised I commented as thoroughly as I did on that quote... I'm generally reluctant to describe things beyond my understanding, and love definitely fits in that category. In my mind it is to be wondered at (and loved for its complexity) but not dissected.
I've claimed to think in colors, and to believe in an entire spectrum of values rather than a grayscale (that is to say, I'm not sure I believe in "white" or "black" at all). To my mind love has its own spectrum... if that makes any sense at all. The word in itself encompasses such a wide range of experiences and emotions, so much even for just one person, and then another person has a different set of experiences and emotions, with some the same, and then someone else... and it goes on like that.
Your third paragraph there, the one that starts "how do I say this," that's basically what I was trying to get at earlier (and failing miserably).
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