On the Use of Fear
Defensiveness is viewed as an obstacle in psychoanalysis. One psychoanalytical figure, Wilhelm Reich, preferred the straight-forwardness of schizophrenics to the secret heart of “homo normalis” or everyday men, who he scoffed at with deep scorn for keeping such a tight hold over their hearts. Yet secrets are healthy and defensiveness is necessary and good. Openness is the road to pain. We reserve intimacy for the worthy, and reject, ultimately, the idealistic talk of such figure as William James, when he says that a person ideally should be in love with everybody. He finds faults with the “exclusions and jealousies” of lovers as if they were obstacles instead of auxiliaries; and he claims the love of a saint in someway could match that between two sincere lovers – which has not been the case even with such extraordinary lovers as Whitman, who loved whole cities and populations. The truest love is one to one, and ever must be. Defensiveness and fear is a necessary and beautiful part of the system. Fear is power: in its right place it is sublime and wonderful.
Allism affirms and embraces all religions, is them all, can exclude none, yet experienced from any point in the system, Allism is the blasphemy of each in the name of all: every religion is only a part, and the true religion, the ultimate divine, is the innermost self. The highest affirmation is blasphemy of all: it is the peculiar logic of Allism to affirm and praise all, and yet to prefer and love most intimately what is our own, what is our self, for that is God to us, that is true Ama, the highest love, and the rest, what others love, their expression, we must accept as their expression, their approach, but not lose sight of our own vision in the name of tolerance. Sooner be intolerant than forfeit an iota of your vision. Sooner be utterly fundamentalist and philistine than give up the true good you really have. All loyalty is due to that, and ultimately, justice is a virtue among aggregates, but the eternal increase of the centermost is the only true good for a man, and the rest, the balance of all against it, the compensation of the system, the justice of all other things, is only to open and allow this.
The person truly open to others will be most vulnerable to him. The smug and tolerant intellectual is not truly sympathetic to others, he has closed his heart, and because he has a politically correct answer for everything, he doesn’t feel the touch of the world, the true pleasure and pain of contact, the suffering and bliss of partiality, of caring for, caring against. Tolerance is a second-hand virtue. A deep-set intolerance is the better virtue, and must balance the external tolerance; for the beauty that ravishes us we must love unconditionally, and having no conditions to hold us back from it, we must deny all conditions, intolerantly renounce whatever keeps us from beauty. Unconditional love puts conditions on all other loves. There can be no promiscuous love of everything except at an abstract level, or at a deific level, calling the all herself “love,” or “Ama” and addressing her under this aspect. Living the baby rabbit and the eagle that feasts on it equally in the same moment, and yet feeling it in an Eastern love detached from suffering with the death is not the love of intimacy; love takes sides, love is unjust. Love ultimately is twinned with fear, love seeking the beauty, fear seeking to thwart what would destroy beauty. And since beauty is by nature a balanced thing, it is vulnerable to fall into imbalance, it has enemies, it has dangers. Beauty is death, beauty has that possibility. A world without dangers would lack all beauty. And therefore, the opposing emotions of love and fear are mutually related; love is to beauty what fear is to power; both mature into necessary and good things.
To fall into the net and nettles of a world of edges, to arise from it, to bleed from the breast and yet love, this is life, this vulnerability. Feeling profoundly wounded, vulnerable, and defensive at ideas, people, expressions, and events that others mock at and ignore is no weakness but the inlet of a variety of power, a dangerous variety that ultimately feeds the energy of a great artist ambition to expression ones potential into an eternal beauty.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong-headed of donning the aspect of the saint and “loving the world,” only one must not imagine that there is more love with more scope, but instead imagine love to be a light that can be focused on a few intently, or on a wide world dimly. There is limited amount of focus the mind can achieve in time and duration; we can only think of so much in a day; likewise, we can only love so much, can only work so much at building a relationship with those we love. If we are married to a political movement, to a religion, or to a traditional family, the stuff of love is basically the same, and none is immediately more exalted, but any of them can became as great at the others, depending on how the man or woman develops a style and intensity. In this, the objects of our love are almost indifferent, so long as they are sincere and genuinely heartfelt. Whether a man is a husband or an artist or a revolutionary is irrelevant as to his intrinsic worth as a human. His ultimate value is in his relationship to his own potential. That is why enemies can respect and honor each other, though they fight for opposite values, seemingly. Both a man and his enemy can be great men, the best of mankind. The old Zoroastrian notions of good versus evil work best in comic books and religious fantasies, but real life strife and wrestling better resembles the agon of the Greeks and their gods who are all good or bad, petty or exalted, but ultimately striving like the men below to in their nobility create a sustained beauty.
And thus a man cannot be valued in terms of how many friends he has, or how much money he makes, or whether he is healthy or diseased, or anything extrinsic like that, since those are circumstances, and not necessarily even obstacles, for every obstacle can be turned into an asset, every hell into a heaven once one has comprehended his real power and assessed what he can really do. What we thought was a curse or a shame was our greatest benefactor – and pity is a shallow emotion to feel for anybody, even for yourself. Man is made for greatness, is a god embryonic, merely awaits the terms of his apotheosis, which never introduce themselves in exulted in world-altering terms, but the most modest and intimate, so that something as small as mending an abused cat can be enough to set his heart in the ascendency of becoming who and what he ultimately can be, that cosmic expression which bleeds from the inner of the heart, that new light, that new sun that has never been guess, that awaits, potentially, in the breast of every man and woman. That new name, that new power is our self, and ultimately in life it can express itself for itself, for the greater beauty of the universe, of we can bend to something external, bow to something out there, in the world, become part of something else. Either way is fine, and a final way to be. Coming to terms with that decision is the entire crisis of life and death, but choosing a purpose worthy of expressing our inner being, our utter name, or self, is the entire purpose of the game of life.
Love is pleasure is happiness is the union with beauty; fear is power is distance is master of space and control of what surrounds us. These two are clearly co-related and cannot be divorced even by such Zoroastrian machinations as heaven and hell. Wherever we find ourselves, the dyad remains. Success is electing the values that express an ascendency over all circumstances, using everything, incorporating everything, denying nothing, and yet retaining a deep intolerance, by proxy, for what does not suit us personally at this time. Intolerance, hate, fear, defensiveness are all moves of the heart, small moves, useful, and the heart is round. The heart is round and feels all emotions. Using each one as moves in the game, as expression of a love of life, of a realization of the fact that life is beautiful, is how a man absolves him to himself, how he achieves apotheosis, which is of the soul in this life, and of the body in the next.
\ ~@M@~ /
perfectidius.com
No comments:
Post a Comment