Love...3
The average person is not able to conceive of 'love' apart from the desire for possession. In his, or her, perspective the desire for possession is the test of 'love', the touchstone by which its 'sincerity' or 'reality' is gauged. Even a mother who is not possessive towards her child is accused of not 'loving' him, of being a 'bad' mother, whereas she alone is a 'good' one. Not only could he not understand that desire for possession is incompatible with love, but he could not recognise as 'love' a sentiment in which it was not present. But the fact is that love is not a sentiment at all but a state of mind, and what he calls 'love' is not love - for 'love' is a violent manifestation of the artificial ego, and love is love in the degree in which the element of self is transcended.
He who may not understand this can try to imagine a state of mind in which he is conscious of a profound but unemotive love for a chosen object - for 'love', the sentiment, and love, the non-affective, are infused by the same force and basically are identical, the one covered in egoistic debris and slime, the other dépouillé and pure.
He can try to imagine the total elimination of the desire for possession of the chosen object, understanding that possession is anyhow an impossibility and can never be more than a psychological complex of projections, attachments, and exigencies. He can envisage the possibility of expecting nothing from the chosen object, demanding nothing, not even the physical presence of that object - for love, having an intemporal and non-spatial character, is not dependent on physical presence or sensual contact. Jealousy must cease to be conceivable in this perspective, and no sense of personal injury can find a place.
'But this is an exclusively 'spiritual' relationship?' 'Spiritual' if the word seems useful, but why exclusively? Purely, if he wishes, in the etymological sense of the word. For the discrimination between spiritual and physical is illusory; they are two aspects of one and the same reality. Physical expression of love is in no way excluded; it may even be an essential element in the relationship, a culmination, the vital expression, since the relationship is on the plane of phenomena.
But in this case the ego remains in abeyance.
The state of mind that is love is self-sufficient. Its actualisations on the plane of phenomena are fulfilments of a cathartic character, psychic and physical.
Promises
At the most a promise is an expression, at a given moment, of a desire, seen as intention, to carry out the action promised. At the least it is a children's game of 'Let's Pretend' played by adults who take it seriously.
Since, in our present state (conditioned by conditioned reflexes), we are the unconscious 'victims' of an intricate mechanism that goes by the name of cause-and-effect and can only do what we must, it makes little difference whether we know that we know what we have to do, whether we suspect that we know what we have to do, or whether we are totally unaware that we know it.
It is inevitable that we know it, since we have done it again and again in the beginningless and endless circuit of the time-process which we see as future-into-past, but which from the dimension at right-angles is a composite present.
To promise to do something which we must do anyhow is meaningless. To promise to do something that may not be, or is not, what we must do, is not only meaningless but sets up a conflict between what we think we want to do and what we have to do, a futile conflict, since ultimately we can only want what we must, and this conflict represents an attempt to obtain what we want by doing something that we are not able to do, or, if you prefer, an attempt to want one thing and obtain the result that could only come from another.
A promise, therefore, is devoid of significance; it cannot have any part in reality. It is no more than a form of words which in no circumstances can express more than the desire or sentiment which actuates us at a given moment.
To make a promise in all seriousness presupposes the notion that we are free to do as we will at any given moment, which is manifestly absurd, and which only ignorance and incomprehension could allow us to suppose. Knowing this, to make a promise is either dishonest or just a conventional form of words to express a sentiment. To try to 'keep' a promise, or to try to oblige another to do so, is as futile as trying to stop the tide from coming in because you want to keep your feet from getting wet....
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We are as unable to change anything but ourselves as Canute was when he tried, or pretended to try, to arrest the tide on the sea-shore. Our only liberty is in the dimension 'within'. If we can change our selves then everything must change as far as our circuit in time is concerned. But opportunities to do that are not readily seized, and they are generally provided by another human being since few of us can change our selves by our selves. The illusory self cannot affect our position on the wheel of recurrence, for an illusion by definition is powerless to affect anything. But in so far as that illusory self may be modified, reduced or extinguished we can escape an invariable recurrence and alter our 'lives' within the time-process, for a helicoidal movement is thereby created in a further dimension - that in which all possibilities exist.
Sacrifice: A Quatrain
1. There is only one person to whom you can sacrifice yourself.
2. There is only one thing that we can sacrifice, and that is our self. And we cannot make that sacrifice too often. Or too completely.
3. An action that does not comprise sacrifice of one's self is not worth taking, for it is cut off from reality, and is not anything.
4. Sacrifice that involves an act of will is not a sacrifice of, but an affirmation of, the self. Sacrifice of the self, on the contrary, is a lâcher-prise, a surrender.Afterthought. Anything one does for oneself is not worth doing.
Love and Sex: A Geometrical Concept
Let us visualise love as a great light. When its source is close to the lens - the screen or prism, as we have called it, which cuts us off from direct access to Reality - the light is evenly distributed throughout the whole field of vision; it is a luminous flood, all-embracing, bathing all alike in its radiance.
But in the measure in which the lens is withdrawn from the source this great light becomes concentrated into a beam and is focused on one object at a time.
The former is impersonal love, sometimes called divine love, or caritas. The latter is exemplified by the love of a man for a woman.
In this image we perceive that there are not different kinds of love, but that love is one whole thing, and that the apparent differences in its manifestations are a question of focus.
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The manifestation of the sexual urge follows a similar pattern. It appears to be a related force but manifesting in a denser medium. The force that was psychic in expression is here predominantly physical. But the image holds good.
On the animal plane, as a physiological necessity, the sexual urge is unfocused, without discrimination, impersonal. But as the lens is withdrawn from the source of the energy the beam becomes concentrated on objects and appears ultimately as a ray that is focused on one object only.
But it is a psychic factor that withdraws the lens in both cases, and in the measure in which the lens is withdrawn, and the beams are concentrated on objects, the related forces appear to coalesce until in the 'explosion' of coition they seem to unite.
So to visualise this mechanism enables us to see in perspective the phenomena to which we tend to attribute so much importance, such as 'fidelity' and 'infidelity' in sexual relations, 'promiscuity', etc., etc.
It enables us to live in harmony with these related forces, and to use them for our happiness instead of tending, as we do, to struggle with them in a dark room as unknown and invisible enemies.
This image in itself is inadequate, however, because it is over-simplified. It is a simple rectilinear image - and nothing in the universe can be supposed to be rectilinear (not even light, as Einstein demonstrated). And it is a tridimensional image - and nothing in the universe can be supposed to be tridimensional. But if we cannot, and we cannot, visualise a quadridimensional image (save in mathematical symbols) we can at least conceive things as spherical.
So conceived the dual processes can be more adequately visualised, but in order to visualise them as in fact they may be we would need to endeavour to conceive the multiplication of the sphere within itself (in a further dimension within itself) and in the measure in which we may be able to do that - if we are able to do it at all - we may approach that accurate vision which otherwise can only be represented symbolically and in numbers.
Revaluation of Values...2
When a beggar renders you the service of accepting a shilling he thanks you for giving him the opportunity of rendering you that service.
La vue juste, correct or true vision, requires a revaluation of values, of all values - as Nietzsche put it in a somewhat different context. The so-called 'living by Zen' or 'Zen way of life or of thinking' is no doubt just that. Such revaluation of values, of current values, is the gauge whereby the degree of comprehension of any pilgrim on the Way may be judged.
The statement in the first paragraph presents one such revaluation. Does it appear nonsense, just queer, or obvious? By that you may assess your degree of understanding.
Revaluation of values must be applied to everything within the reach of the mind; nothing has a right to escape it, from the most abstruse speculation down to the apparent facts and circumstances of the daily life that goes on around us, domestic, social, political.
When you hear someone speaking in all earnestness of the benefits of industrialisation, of social services, of democracy, of the standard of living, of works of public utility, of progress - whatever sense or meaning may be implied by any of these terms, or of abstract notions such as Justice, Liberty, Nationalism, Equality, do you think of them as real things or do you smile?
If you take them seriously and judge them you are accepting them as values. But if you have come to revalue values then you perceive their total unreality. You do not judge them as 'good' or 'desirable', you do not judge them as 'bad' or 'harmful', you do not judge them as anything in themselves, you merely perceive that they are not anything at all. They are what children do so seriously with boxes of bricks under the dining-room table. Very serious matters in their eyes, very unimportant indeed in yours. Our values change as we grow up.
Revaluation of values automatically results from comprehension of the unreal. Comprehension of the unreal is an indirect perception of Reality. Reality cannot be positively comprehended. It can never be expressed in dualistic language. It can only be approached by negation. But that is true Discrimination, the only Discrimination that can be so called, and it is la Vue Juste or True Vision.
Note; It should not be impossible for a pilgrim on the way who had comprehended the need for such a revaluation of values - and only a pilgrim could do so - to take part on the plane of seeming in the activities implied by the terms in question. He could discriminate regarding these notions, but it should not be possible for him to see them as 'desirable' without at the same time seeing them as, and in the same degree, 'undesirable' (for so they must necessarily be). He would in fact be taking part in the children's game of bricks under the dining-room table as any of us might do, as seriously as he could, but his tongue could never be far removed from his cheek.
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Nationalism
There are no nations: there are only nationalisms.
Nor is there any such thing as a public, other than as a concept in the mind of a politician, an editor, a theatre, art or other 'director', a dualistic concept whose inevitable falsity is regularly duplicated on the plane of experience.
By 'nationalisms' is meant sentiments of a nationalistic character, perfectly imaginary and devoid of any kind of reality, and, by inference, large groups of individuals whose common feature is that they are a prey to this illusion.
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Definition of Civilisation
Civilisation is based on a sort of stabilisation of egoisms in equilibrium.
When the balance is definitely upset the civilisation crumbles.
